The Institute

1

Three weeks passed.

Luke ate. He slept, woke, ate again. He soon memorized the menu, and joined the other kids in sarcastic applause when something on it changed. Some days there were tests. Some days there were shots. Some days there were both. Some days there were neither. A few shots made him sick. Most didn’t. His throat never closed up again, for which he was grateful. He hung out in the playground. He watched TV, making friends with Oprah, Ellen, Dr. Phil, Judge Judy. He watched YouTube videos of cats looking at themselves in mirrors and dogs that caught Frisbees. Sometimes he watched alone, sometimes with some of the other kids. When Harry came into his room, the twins came with him and demanded cartoons. When Luke went to Harry’s room, the twins were almost always there. Harry didn’t care for cartoons. Harry was partial to wrestling, cage fighting videos, and NASCAR pile-ups. His usual greeting to Luke was “Watch this one.” The twins were coloring fools, the caretakers supplying endless stacks of coloring books. Usually they stayed inside the lines, but there was one day when they didn’t, and laughed a lot, and Luke deduced they were either drunk or high. When he asked Harry, Harry said they wanted to try it. He had the good grace to look ashamed, and when they vomited (in tandem, as they did everything), he had the good grace to look more ashamed. And he cleaned up the mess. One day Helen did a triple roll on the trampoline, laughed, bowed, then burst into tears and would not be consoled. When Luke tried, she hit him with her small fists, whap-whap-whap-whap. For awhile Luke beat all comers at chess, and when that got boring he found ways to lose, which was surprisingly hard for him.

He felt like he was sleeping even when he was awake. He felt his IQ declining, absolutely felt it, like water going down in a water cooler because someone had left the tap open. He marked off the time of this strange summer with the date strip on his computer. Other than YouTube vids, he only used his laptop—with one significant exception—to IM with George or Helen in their rooms. He never initiated those conversations, and kept them as brief as he could.

What the shit is wrong with you? Helen texted once.

Nothing, he texted back.

Why are we still in Front Half, do you think? George texted. Not that I am complaining.

Don’t know, Luke texted, and signed off.

He discovered it wasn’t hard to hide his grief from the caretakers, techs, and doctors; they were used to dealing with depressed children. Yet even in his deep unhappiness, he sometimes thought of the bright image Avery had projected: a canary flying from its cage.

His waking sleep of grief was sometimes pierced with brilliant slices of memory that always came unexpectedly: his father spraying him with the garden hose; his father making a foul shot with his back turned to the hoop and Luke tackling him when it went in and both of them falling on the grass, laughing; his mother bringing a gigantic cupcake covered with flaming candles to the table on his twelfth birthday; his mother hugging him and saying You’re getting so big; his mother and father dancing like crazy in the kitchen while Rihanna sang “Pon de Replay.” These memories were beautiful, and they stung like nettles.

When he wasn’t thinking of the slain Falcon Heights couple—dreaming of them—Luke thought of the cage he was in and the free bird he aspired to be. Those were the only times when his mind regained its former sharp focus. He noticed things that seemed to confirm his belief that the Institute was operating in an inertial glide, like a rocket that switches off its engines once escape velocity has been attained. The black-glass surveillance bulbs in the hallway ceilings, for instance. Most of them were dirty, as if they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. This was especially true in the deserted West Wing of the residence floor. The cameras inside the bulbs probably still worked, but the view they gave would be blurry at best. Even so, it seemed that no orders had come down for Fred and his fellow janitors—Mort, Connie, Jawed—to clean them, and that meant whoever was supposed to monitor the hallways didn’t give much of a shit if the view had grown murky.

Luke went about his days with his head down, doing what he was told without argument, but when he wasn’t zoned out in his room, he had become a little pitcher with big ears. Most of what he heard was useless, but he took it all in, anyway. Took it in and stored it away. Gossip, for instance. Like how Dr. Evans was always chasing after Dr. Richardson, trying to strike up conversations, too pussy-stunned (this phrase from caretaker Norma) to know Felicia Richardson wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Like how Joe and two other caretakers, Chad and Gary, sometimes used the tokens they didn’t give away to get wine nips and those little bottles of hard lemonade from the canteen vending machine in the East Lounge. Sometimes they talked about their families, or about drinking at a bar called Outlaw Country, where there were bands. “If you want to call that music,” Luke once overheard a caretaker named Sherry telling Fake Smile Gladys. This bar, known to the male techs and caretakers as The Cunt, was in a town called Dennison River Bend. Luke could get no clear fix on how far away this town was, but thought it must be within twenty-five miles, thirty at most, because they all seemed to go when they had time off.

Luke tucked away names when he heard them. Dr. Evans was James, Dr. Hendricks was Dan, Tony was Fizzale, Gladys was Hickson, Zeke was Ionidis. If he ever got out of here, if this canary ever flew from its cage, he hoped to have quite a list for when he testified against these assholes in a court of law. He realized that might only be a fantasy, but it kept him going.

Now that he was marching through the days like a good little boy, he was sometimes left alone on C-Level for short periods of time, always with the admonition to stay put. He would nod, give the technician time to depart on his errand, and then leave himself. There were plenty of cameras on the lower levels, and these were all kept nice and clean, but no alarms went off and no caretakers came charging down the hall waving their zap-sticks. Twice he was spotted walking around and brought back, once with a scolding and once with a perfunctory slap to the back of his neck.

On one of these expeditions (he always tried to look bored and aimless, a kid just passing the time before the next test or being allowed to go back to his room), Luke found a treasure. In the MRI room, which was empty that day, he spied one of the cards they used to operate the elevator lying half-hidden under a computer monitor. He walked past the table, picked it up, and slipped it in his pocket as he peered into the empty MRI tube. He almost expected the card to start yelling “Thief, thief ” when he left the room (like the magic harp Jack the beanstalk boy stole from the giant), but nothing happened, then or later. Didn’t they keep track of those cards? It seemed they did not. Or maybe it was expired, as useless as a hotel key card when the guest it had been computer-coded for checked out.

But when Luke tried the card in the elevator a day later, he was delighted to find it worked. When Dr. Richardson came across him a day later, peering into the D-Level room where the immersion tank was kept, he expected punishment—maybe a jolt from the zap-stick she kept holstered under the white coat she usually wore, maybe a beating from Tony or Zeke. Instead, she actually slipped him a token, for which he thanked her.

“I haven’t had that one yet,” Luke said, pointing to the tank. “Is it awful?”

“No, it’s fun,” she said, and Luke gave her a big grin, as if he actually believed her bullshit. “Now what are you doing down here?”

“Caught a ride with one of the caretakers. I don’t know which one. He forgot his nametag, I guess.”

“That’s good,” she said. “If you knew his name, I’d have to report him, and he’d get in trouble. After that? Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.” She rolled her eyes and Luke gave her a look that said I sympathize. She took him back to the elevator, asked him where he was supposed to be, and he told her B-Level. She rode up with him, asked him how his pain was, and he told her it was fine, all gone.

The card also took him to E-Level, where there was a lot of mechanical shit, but when he tried to go lower—there was a lower, he’d heard conversations about levels F and G—Miss Elevator Voice pleasantly informed him that access was denied. Which was okay. You learned by trying.

There were no paper tests in Front Half, but there were plenty of EEGs. Sometimes Dr. Evans did kids in bunches, but not always. Once, when Luke was being tested alone, Dr. Evans suddenly grimaced, put a hand to his stomach, and said he’d be right back. He told Luke not to touch anything and rushed out. To drop a load, Luke presumed.

He examined the computer screens, ran his fingers over a couple of keyboards, thought about messing with them a little, decided it would be a bad idea, and went to the door instead. He looked out just as the elevator opened and the big bald guy emerged, wearing the same expensive brown suit. Or maybe it was another one. For all Luke knew, Stackhouse had a whole closetful of expensive brown suits. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. He started down the hall, shuffling through them, and Luke withdrew quickly. C-4, the room with the EEG and EKG machines, had a small equipment alcove lined with shelves full of various supplies. Luke went in there without knowing if hiding was an ordinary hunch, one of his new TP brainwaves, or plain old paranoia. In any case, he was just in time. Stackhouse poked his head in, glanced around, then left. Luke waited to be sure he wasn’t going to come back, then resumed his seat next to the EEG machine.

Two or three minutes later, Evans hurried in with his white lab coat flying out behind him. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were wide. He grabbed Luke by the shirt. “What did Stackhouse say when he saw you in here by yourself? Tell me!”

“He didn’t say anything because he didn’t see me. I was looking out the door for you, and when Mr. Stackhouse got off the elevator, I went in there.” He pointed at the equipment alcove, then looked up at Evans with wide, innocent eyes. “I didn’t want to get you in any trouble.”

“Good boy,” Evans said, and clapped him on the back. “I had a call of nature, and I felt sure you could be trusted. Now let’s get this test done, shall we? Then you can go upstairs and play with your friends.”

Before calling Yolanda, another caretaker (last name: Freeman), to escort him back to A-Level, Evans gave Luke a dozen tokens and another hearty clap on the back. “Our little secret, right?”

“Right,” Luke said.

He actually thinks I like him, Luke marveled. How does that fry your bacon? Wait’ll I tell George.

2

Only he never did. There were two new kids at supper that evening, and one old one missing. George had been taken away, for all Luke knew while he himself was hiding from Stackhouse in the equipment alcove.

“He’s with the others,” Avery whispered to Luke that night as they lay in bed. “Sha says he’s crying because he’s scared. She told him that was normal. She told him they’re all scared.”

3

Two or three times on his expeditions, Luke stopped outside the B-Level lounge, where the conversations were interesting and illuminating. Staff used the room, but so did outside groups that sometimes arrived still carrying travel bags that had no airline luggage tickets on their handles. When they saw Luke—maybe getting a drink from the nearby water fountain, maybe pretending to read a poster on hygiene—most looked right through him, as if he were no more than part of the furniture. The people making up these groups had a hard look about them, and Luke became increasingly sure they were the Institute’s hunter-gatherers. It made sense, because there were more kids in West Wing now. Once Luke overheard Joe telling Hadad—the two of them were goodbuddies—that the Institute was like the beachfront town in Long Island where he’d grown up. “Sometimes the tide’s in,” he said, “sometimes it’s out.”

“More often out these days,” Hadad replied, and maybe it was true, but as that July wore on, it was definitely coming in.

Some of the outside groups were trios, some were quartets. Luke associated them with the military, maybe only because the men all had short hair and the women wore theirs pulled tight to the skull and bunned in back. He heard an orderly refer to one of these groups as Emerald. A tech called another Ruby Red. This latter group was a trio, two women and a man. He knew that Ruby Red was the group that had come to Minneapolis to kill his parents and snatch him away. He tried for their names, listening with his mind as well as his ears, and got only one: the woman who had sprayed something in his face on his last night in Falcon Heights was Michelle. When she saw him in the hall, leaning over the drinking fountain, her eyes swept past him… then came back for a moment or two.

Michelle.

Another name to remember.

It didn’t take long for Luke to get confirmation of his theory that these were the people tasked with bringing in fresh TPs and TKs. The Emerald group was in the break room, and as Luke stood outside, reading that poster on hygiene for the dozenth time, he heard one of the Emerald men saying they had to go back out to make a quick pickup in Missouri. The next day a bewildered fourteen-year-old girl named Frieda Brown joined their growing West Wing group.

“I don’t belong here,” she told Luke. “It’s a mistake.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Luke replied, then told her how she could get tokens. He wasn’t sure she was taking it in, but she’d catch on eventually. Everyone did.

4

No one seemed to mind Avery sleeping in Luke’s room almost every night. He was the mailman, and to Luke he brought letters from Kalisha in Back Half, missives that came via telepathy rather than USPS. The fact of his parents’ murder was still too fresh and hurtful for these letters to wake Luke from his half-dreaming state, but the news they contained was disturbing, all the same. It was also enlightening, although it was enlightenment Luke could have done without. In Front Half, kids were tested and punished for misbehavior; in Back Half they were being put to work. Used. And, it seemed, destroyed, little by little.

The movies brought on the headaches, and the headaches lasted longer and got worse after each one. George was fine when he arrived, just scared, according to Kalisha, but after four or five days of exposure to the dots, and the movies, and the hurty shots, he also began to have headaches.

The movies were in a small screening room with plushy comfortable seats. They started with old-time cartoons—sometimes Road Runner, sometimes Bugs Bunny, sometimes Goofy and Mickey. Then, after the warm-up, came the real show. Kalisha thought the films were short, half an hour at most, but it was hard to tell because she was woozy during and headachey afterward. They all were.

Her first two times in the screening room, the Back Half kids got a double feature. The star of the first one was a man with thinning red hair. He wore a black suit and drove a shiny black car. Avery tried to show this car to Luke, but Luke got only a vague image, maybe because that was all Kalisha could send. Still, he thought it must be a limousine or a Town Car, because Avery said the red-haired man’s passengers always rode in the back. Also, the guy opened the doors for the passengers when they got in and out. On most days he had the same ones, mostly old white guys, but one was a younger guy with a scar on his cheek.

“Sha says he has regulars,” Avery whispered as he and Luke lay in bed together. “She says it’s Washington, D.C., because the man drives past the Capitol and the White House and sometimes she sees that big stone needle.”

“The Washington Monument.”

“Yeah, that.”

Toward the end of this movie, the redhead swapped the black suit for regular clothes. They saw him riding a horse, then pushing a little girl on a swing, then eating ice cream with the little girl on a park bench. After that Dr. Hendricks came on the screen, holding up an unlit Fourth of July sparkler.

The second feature was of a man in what Kalisha called an Arab headdress, which probably meant a keffiyeh. He was in a street, then he was in an outdoor café drinking tea or coffee from a glass, then he was making a speech, then he was swinging a little boy by the hands. Once he was on television. The movie ended with Dr. Hendricks holding up the unlit sparkler.

The following morning, Sha and the others got a Sylvester and Tweety cartoon followed by fifteen or twenty minutes of the red-haired car driver. Then lunch in the Back Half cafeteria, where there were free cigarettes. That afternoon it was Porky Pig followed by the Arab. Each film ended with Dr. Hendricks and the unlit sparkler. That night they were given hurty shots and a fresh dose of the flashing lights. Then they were taken back to the screening room, where they watched twenty minutes of car crash movies. After each crash, Dr. Hendricks came on the screen, holding up the unlit sparkler.

Luke, grief-stricken but not stupid, began to understand. It was crazy, but no crazier than occasionally being able to know what was going on in other peoples’ heads. Also, it explained a great deal.

“Kalisha says she thinks she blacked out and had a dream while the crashes were going on,” Avery whispered in Luke’s ear. “Only she’s not sure it was a dream. She says the kids—her, Nicky, Iris, Donna, Len, some others—were standing in those dots with their arms around each other and their heads together. She says Dr. Hendricks was there, and this time he lit the sparkler, and that was scary. But as long as they stayed together, holding each other, their heads didn’t ache no more. But she says maybe it was a dream, because she woke up in her room. The rooms in Back Half aren’t like ours. They get locked up at night.” Avery paused. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore tonight, Lukey.”

“Fine. Go to sleep.”

Avery did, but Luke lay awake for a long time.

The next day, he finally used his laptop for something more than checking the date, IMing with Helen, or watching BoJack Horseman. He went to Mr. Griffin, and from Mr. Griffin to the New York Times, which informed him he could read ten free articles before he hit a pay wall. Luke didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but was sure he’d know it when he saw it. And he did. A headline on the front page of the July 15th issue read REPRESENTATIVE BERKOWITZ SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES.

Rather than reading the article, Luke went to the day before. This headline read PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL MARK BERKOWITZ CRITICALLY INJURED IN CAR ACCIDENT. There was a picture. Berkowitz, a US Representative from Ohio, had black hair and a scar on his cheek from a wound suffered in Afghanistan. Luke read the story quickly. It said that the Lincoln Town Car in which Berkowitz had been riding while on his way to a meeting with foreign dignitaries from Poland and Yugoslavia had veered out of control and hit a concrete bridge stanchion. The driver had been killed instantly; unnamed MedStar Hospital sources described Berkowitz’s injuries as “extremely grave.” The article didn’t say if the driver was a redhead, but Luke knew he had been, and he was pretty sure that some guy in one of the Arab countries was going to die soon, if he hadn’t already. Or maybe he was going to murder somebody important.

Luke’s growing certainty that he and the other kids were being prepped for use as psychic drones—yes, even inoffensive Avery Dixon, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose—began to rouse Luke, but it took the horror show with Harry Cross to bring him fully out of his sleep of grief.

5

The following evening there were fourteen or fifteen kids in the caff at dinner, some talking, some laughing, some of the new ones crying or shouting. In a way, Luke thought, being in the Institute was like being in an old-time mental asylum where the crazy people were just kept and never cured.

Harry wasn’t there at first, and he hadn’t been at lunch. The big galoot wasn’t much of a blip on Luke’s radar, but he was hard to miss at meals because Gerda and Greta always sat with him, one on either side in their identical outfits, watching him with shining eyes as he blathered away about NASCAR, wrestling, his favorite shows, and life “down Selma.” If someone told him to pipe down, the little Gs would turn killing looks on the interrupting someone.

This evening the Gs were eating on their own, and looking unhappy about it. They had saved Harry a seat between them, though, and when he came walking slowly in, belly swinging and glowing with sunburn, they rushed to him with shouts of greeting. For once he barely seemed to notice them. There was a vacant look in his eyes, and they didn’t seem to be tracking together the way eyes are supposed to. His chin was shiny with drool, and there was a wet spot on the crotch of his pants. Conversation died. The newest arrivals looked puzzled and horrified; those who had been around long enough to get a run of tests threw worried glances at each other.

Luke and Helen exchanged a look. “He’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s just worse for some kids than it is for—”

Avery was sitting beside her. Now he took one of her hands in both of his. He spoke with eerie calmness. “He’s not okay. He’ll never be okay.”

Harry let out a cry, dropped to his knees, then hit the floor face-first. His nose and lips sprayed blood on the linoleum. He first began to shake, then to spasm, legs pulling up and shooting out in a Y shape, arms flailing. He started to make a growling noise—not like an animal but like an engine stuck in low gear and being revved too hard. He flopped onto his back, still growling and spraying bloody foam from between his blabbering lips. His teeth chomped up and down.

The little Gs began shrieking. As Gladys ran in from the hall and Norma from around the steam table, one of the twins knelt and tried to hug Harry. His big right hand rose, swung out, came whistling back. It struck her on the side of her face with terrible force, and sent her flying. Her head struck the wall with a thud. The other twin ran to her sister, screaming.

The cafeteria was in an uproar. Luke and Helen stayed seated, Helen with her arm around Avery’s shoulders (more to comfort herself than the little boy, it seemed; Avery appeared unmoved), but many of the other kids were gathering around the seizing boy. Gladys shoved a couple of them away and snarled, “Get back, you idiots!” No big fake smile tonight for the big G.

Now more Institute personnel were appearing: Joe and Hadad, Chad, Carlos, a couple Luke didn’t know, including one still in his civvies who must have just come on duty. Harry’s body was rising and falling in galvanic leaps, as if the floor had been electrified. Chad and Carlos pinned his arms. Hadad zapped him in the solar plexus, and when that didn’t stop the seizures, Joe hit him in the neck, the crackle of a zap-stick set on high audible even in the babble of confused voices. Harry went limp. His eyes bulged beneath half-closed lids. Foam drizzled from the corners of his mouth. The tip of his tongue protruded.

“He’s all right, situation under control!” Hadad bellowed. “Go back to your tables! He’s fine!”

The kids drew away, silent now, watching. Luke leaned over to Helen and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” Helen said, “but look at that one.” She pointed to the twin who had been driven to the wall. Luke saw that the little girl’s eyes were glazed and her head looked all crooked on her neck. Blood was running down one of her cheeks and dripping onto the shoulder of her dress.

“Wake up!” the other twin was shouting, and began to shake her. Silverware flew from the tables in a storm; kids and caretakers ducked. “Wake up, Harry didn’t mean to hurt you, wake up, WAKE UP!”

“Which one is which?” Luke asked Helen, but it was Avery who replied, and in that same eerily calm voice.

“The screamy one throwing the silverware is Gerda. The dead one is Greta.”

“She’s not dead,” Helen said in a shocked voice. “She can’t be.”

Knives, forks, and spoons rose to the ceiling (I could never do anything like that, Luke thought) and then fell with a clatter.

“She is, though,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “So is Harry.” He stood up, holding one of Helen’s hands and one of Luke’s. “I liked Harry even if he did push me down. I’m not hungry anymore.” He looked from one to the other. “And neither are you guys.”

The three of them left unnoticed, giving the screaming twin and her dead sister a wide berth. Dr. Evans came striding up the hall from the elevator, looking harried and put out. Probably he was eating his dinner, Luke thought.

Behind them, Carlos was calling, “Everyone’s fine, you guys! Settle down and finish your dinner, everyone’s just fine!”

“The dots killed him,” Avery said. “Dr. Hendricks and Dr. Evans never should have showed him the dots even if he was a pink. Maybe his BDNF was still too high. Or maybe it was something else, like a allergy.”

“What’s BDNF?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know. I only know that if kids have a really high one, they shouldn’t get the big shots until Back Half.”

“What about you?” Helen asked, turning to Luke.

Luke shook his head. Kalisha mentioned it once, and he had heard the initials bandied about on a couple of his wandering expeditions. He’d thought about googling BDNF, but was wary it might set off an alarm.

“You’ve never had them, have you?” Luke asked Avery. “The big shots? The special tests?”

“No. But I will. In Back Half.” He looked at Luke solemnly. “Dr. Evans might get in trouble for what he did to Harry. I hope he does. I’m scared to death of the lights. And the big shots. The powerful shots.”

“Me too,” Helen said. “The shots I’ve gotten already are bad enough.”

Luke thought of telling Helen and Avery about the shot that had made his throat close up, or the two that had made him vomit (seeing those goddamned dots each time he heaved), but it seemed like pretty small beans compared to what had just happened to Harry.

“Make way, you guys,” Joe said.

They stood against the wall near the poster saying I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY. Joe and Hadad passed them with Harry Cross’s body. Carlos had the little girl with the broken neck. It lolled back and forth over his arm, her hair hanging down. Luke, Helen, and Avery watched them until they got into the elevator, and Luke found himself wondering if the morgue was on E-Level or F.

“She looked like a doll,” Luke heard himself say. “She looked like her own doll.”

Avery, whose eerie, sybilline calm had actually been shock, began to cry.

“I’m going to my room,” Helen said. She patted Luke on the shoulder and kissed Avery on the cheek. “See you guys tomorrow.”

Only they didn’t. The blue caretakers came for her in the night and they saw her no more.

6

Avery urinated, brushed his teeth, dressed in the pj’s he now kept in Luke’s room, and got into Luke’s bed. Luke did his own bathroom business, got in with the Avester, and turned out the light. He put his forehead against Avery’s and whispered, “I have to get out of here.”

How?

Not a spoken word but one that briefly lit up in his mind and then faded away. Luke was getting a little better at catching these thoughts now, but he could only do it when Avery was close, and sometimes still couldn’t do it at all. The dots—what Avery said were the Stasi Lights—had given him some TP, but not much. Just like his TK had never been much. His IQ might be over the moon, but in terms of psychic ability, he was a dope. I could use some more, he thought, and one of his grandfather’s old sayings occurred to him: wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.

“I don’t know,” Luke said. What he did know was that he had been here a long time—longer than Helen, and she was gone. They would come for him soon.

7

In the middle of the night, Avery shook Luke out of a dream about Greta Wilcox—Greta lying against the wall with her head all wrong on her neck. This was not a dream he was sorry to leave. The Avester was huddled up against him, all knees and sharp elbows, shivering like a dog caught in a thunderstorm. Luke turned on the bedside lamp. Avery’s eyes were swimming with tears.

“What’s wrong?” Luke asked. “Bad dream?”

“No. They woke me up.”

“Who?” Luke looked around, but the room was empty and the door was shut.

“Sha. And Iris.”

“You can hear Iris as well as Kalisha?” This was new.

“I couldn’t before, but… they had the movies, then they had the dots, then they had the sparkler, then they had their group hug with their heads together, I told you about that—”

“Yes.”

“Usually it’s better afterward, the headaches go away for awhile, but Iris’s came back as soon as the hug was over and it was so bad she started screaming and wouldn’t stop.” Avery’s voice rose beyond its usual treble, wavering in a way that made Luke feel cold all over. “ ‘My head, my head, it’s splitting open, oh my poor head, make it stop, somebody make it st—’ ”

Luke gave Avery a hard shake. “Lower your voice. They might be listening.”

Avery took several deep breaths. “I wish you could hear me inside your head, like Sha. I could tell you everything then. Telling out loud is hard for me.”

“Try.”

“Sha and Nicky tried to comfort her, but they couldn’t. She scratched at Sha and tried to punch Nicky. Then Dr. Hendricks came—he was still in his pajamas—and he called for the red guys. They were going to take Iris away.”

“To the back half of Back Half?”

“I think so. But then she started to get better.”

“Maybe they gave her a painkiller. Or a sedative.”

“I don’t think so. I think she just got better. Maybe Kalisha helped her?”

“Don’t ask me,” Luke said. “How would I know?”

But Avery wasn’t listening. “There’s a way to help, maybe. A way they can…” He trailed off. Luke thought he was going back to sleep. Then Avery stirred and said, “There’s something really bad over there.”

“It’s all bad over there,” Luke said. “The movies, the shots, the dots… all bad.”

“Yeah, but it’s something else. Something worse. Like… I dunno…”

Luke put his forehead against Avery’s and listened as hard as he could. What he picked up was the sound of an airplane passing far overhead. “A sound? Kind of a droning sound?”

“Yes! But not like an airplane. More like a hive of bees. It’s the hum. I think it comes from the back half of Back Half.”

Avery shifted in the bed. In the light of the lamp, he no longer looked like a child; he looked like a worried old man. “The headaches get worse and worse and last longer and longer, because they won’t stop making them look at the dots… you know, the lights… and they won’t stop giving them the shots and making them watch the movies.”

“And the sparkler,” Luke said. “They have to look at that, because it’s the trigger.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Try.”

Luke put his arms around Avery, and looked up at the ceiling. He was thinking of a bluesy old song his mother sometimes used to sing: I was yours from the start, you took my heart. You got the best, so what the hell, come on, baby, take the rest.

Luke was increasingly sure that was exactly what they were there for: To have the best taken away. They were weaponized here, and used there until they were emptied out. Then they went to the back half of Back Half, where they joined the drone… whatever that was.

Things like that don’t happen, he told himself. Except people would say things like the Institute didn’t happen, either, certainly not in America, and if they did, word would get out because you couldn’t keep anything a secret these days; everyone blabbed. Yet here he was. Here they were. The thought of Harry Cross seizing and foaming at the mouth on the cafeteria floor was awful, the sight of that harmless little girl with her head on crooked and her glazed eyes staring at nothing was worse, but nothing he could think of was as terrible as minds subjected to constant assault until they finally became part of a hive drone. According to the Avester that had almost happened to Iris tonight, and it would soon happen to Nicky, heartthrob of all the girls, and wisecracking George.

And Kalisha.

Luke finally slept. When he woke, breakfast was long over and he was alone in the bed. Luke ran down the hall and burst into Avery’s room, sure of what he would find, but the Avester’s posters were still on the walls and his G.I. Joes were still on the bureau, this morning in a skirmish line.

Luke breathed a sigh of relief, then cringed when he was slapped across the back of the head. He turned and saw Winona (last name: Briggs). “Put on some clothes, young man. I’m not interested in seeing any male in his undies unless he’s at least twenty-two and buffed out. You’re not either one.”

She waited for him to get going. Luke gave her the finger (okay, so he held it hidden against his chest instead of flashing it, but it still felt good) and returned to his room to dress. Far down the hall, where it met the next corridor, he saw a Dandux laundry basket. It could have belonged to Jolene or one of the other housekeepers who had appeared to help deal with the current influx of “guests,” but he knew it was Maureen’s. He could feel her. She was back.

8

When he saw her fifteen minutes later, Luke thought, This woman is sicker than ever.

She was cleaning out the twins’ room, taking down the posters of Disney princes and princesses and putting them carefully in a cardboard box. The little Gs’ beds had already been stripped, the sheets piled in Maureen’s basket with the other dirty laundry she had collected.

“Where’s Gerda?” Luke asked. He also wondered where Greta and Harry were, not to mention any others who might have died as a result of their bullshit experiments. Was there perhaps a crematorium somewhere in this hole of hell? Maybe way down on F-Level? If so, it must have state-of-the-art filters, or he would have smelled the smoke of burning children.

“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Get out of here, boy, and go about your business.” Her voice was brisk and dry, dismissive, but all that was show. Even low-grade telepathy could be useful.

Luke got an apple from the bowl of fruit in the caff, and a pack of Round-Ups (SMOKE JUST LIKE DADDY) from one of the vending machines. The pack of candy cigarettes made him miss Kalisha, but it also made him feel close to her. He peeked out at the playground, where eight or ten kids were using the equipment—a full house, compared to when Luke himself had come in. Avery was sitting on one of the pads surrounding the trampoline, his head on his chest, his eyes closed, fast asleep. Luke wasn’t surprised. Little shit had had a tough night.

Someone thumped his shoulder, hard but not in an unfriendly way. Luke turned and saw Stevie Whipple—one of the new kids. “Man, that was bad last night,” Stevie said. “You know, the big redhead and that little girl.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Then this morning those guys in the red unis came and took that punk-rock girl to Back Half.”

Luke looked at Stevie in silent dismay. “Helen?”

“Yeah, her. This place sucks,” Stevie said, staring out at the playground. “I wish I had, like, jet-boots. I’d be gone so fast it’d make your head spin.”

“Jet-boots and a bomb,” Luke said.

“Huh?”

“Bomb the motherfucker, then fly away.”

Stevie considered this, his moon face going slack, then laughed. “That’s good. Yeah, bomb it flat and then jet-boot the hell outta here. Hey, you ain’t got an extra token, do you? I get hungry this time of day and I ain’t much on apples. I’m more of a Twix man. Or Funyuns. Funyuns are good.”

Luke, who’d gotten many tokens while burnishing his good-boy image, gave Stevie Whipple three and told him to knock himself out.

9

Remembering the first time he’d set eyes on Kalisha, and perhaps to commemorate the occasion, Luke went inside, sat down next to the ice machine, and put one of the candy cigarettes in his mouth. He was on his second Round-Up when Maureen came trundling along with her basket, now filled with fresh sheets and pillowcases.

“How’s your back?” Luke asked her.

“Worse than ever.”

“Sorry. That sucks.”

“I got my pills. They help.” She leaned over and grasped her shins, which put her face near Luke’s.

He whispered, “They took my friend Kalisha. Nicky and George. Helen, just today.” Most of his friends were gone. And who had become the Institute’s long-timer? Why, nobody but Luke Ellis.

“I know.” She was also whispering. “I been in Back Half. We can’t keep meeting here and talking, Luke. They’ll get suspicious.”

This seemed to make sense, but there was something odd about it, just the same. Like Joe and Hadad, Maureen talked to the kids all the time, and gave them tokens when she had them to give. And weren’t there other places, dead zones, where the audio surveillance didn’t work? Certainly Kalisha had thought so.

Maureen stood up and stretched, bracing her hands against the small of her back. She spoke in a normal voice now. “Are you just going to sit there all day?”

Luke sucked in the candy cigarette currently dangling from his lower lip, crunched it up, and got to his feet.

“Wait, here’s a token.” She pulled it from the pocket of her dress and handed it to him. “Use it for something tasty.”

Luke ambled back to his room and sprawled on his bed. He curled up and unfolded the tight square of note-paper she had given him along with the token. Maureen’s hand was shaky and old-fashioned, but that was only part of the reason it was hard to read. The writing was small. She had packed the whole sheet from side to side, top to bottom, all of one side and part of the other. It made Luke think of something Mr. Sirois had said in English class, about Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories: They are miracles of compression. That was true of this communique. How many drafts had it taken her to boil down what she had to tell him to these essentials, written on one small piece of paper? He admired her brevity even as he began to understand what Maureen had been doing. What she was.

So Maureen was a snitch, listening to kids in places that were supposed to be safe, then running to Sigsby (or Stackhouse) with little bits of info given to her in whispers. She might not be the only one, either; the two friendly caretakers, Joe and Hadad, might also be snitching. In June, Luke would have hated her for this, but now it was July, and he was much older.

He went into the bathroom and dropped Maureen’s note into the john when he lowered his pants, just as he’d done with Kalisha’s. That seemed like a hundred years ago.

10

That afternoon, Stevie Whipple got up a game of dodgeball. Most of the kids played, but Luke declined. He went to the games cabinet for the chessboard (in memory of Nicky) and replayed what many considered the best game ever, Yakov Estrin versus Hans Berliner, Copenhagen, 1965. Forty-two moves, a classic. He went back and forth, white-black, white-black, white-black, his memory doing the work while most of his mind remained on Maureen’s note.

He hated the thought of Maureen snitching, but understood her reasons. There were other people here with at least some shreds of decency left, but working in a place like this destroyed your moral compass. They were damned, whether they knew it or not. Maureen might be, too. The only thing that mattered now was whether or not she really knew a way he might be able to get out of here. To do that she needed to give him information without arousing the suspicions of Mrs. Sigsby and that guy Stackhouse (first name: Trevor). There was also the corollary question of whether or not she could be trusted. Luke thought she could. Not just because he had helped her in her time of need, but because the note had a desperate quality, the feel of a woman who had decided to bet all her chips on one turn of the wheel. Besides, what choice did he have?

Avery was one of the dodgers running around inside the circle, and now someone bonked him right in the face with the ball. He sat down and began to cry. Stevie Whipple helped him to his feet and examined his nose. “No blood, you’re okay. Why don’t you go over there and sit with Luke?”

“Out of the game is what you mean,” Avery said, still sniffling. “That’s okay. I can still—”

“Avery!” Luke called. He held up a couple of tokens. “You want some peanut butter crackers and a Coke?”

Avery trotted over, smack in the face forgotten. “Sure!”

They went inside to the canteen. Avery dropped a token into the snack machine slot, and when he bent over to fish the package from the tray, Luke bent over with him and whispered in his ear. “You want to help me get out of here?”

Avery held up the package of Nabs. “Want one?” And in Luke’s mind, the word lit up and faded: How?

“I’ll just take one, you have the rest,” Luke said, and sent back three words: Tell you tonight.

Two conversations going on, one aloud, one between their minds. And that was how it would work with Maureen.

He hoped.

11

After breakfast the next day, Gladys and Hadad took Luke down to the immersion tank. There they left him with Zeke and Dave.

Zeke Ionidis said, “We do tests here, but it’s also where we dunk bad boys and girls who don’t tell the truth. Do you tell the truth, Luke?”

“Yes,” Luke said.

“Have you got the telep?”

“The what?” Knowing perfectly well what Zeke the Freak meant.

“The telep. The TP. You got it?”

“No. I’m TK, remember? Move spoons and stuff?” He tried a smile. “Can’t bend them, though. I’ve tried.”

Zeke shook his head. “If you’re TK and see the dots, you get the telep. You’re TP and see the dots, you move the spoons. That’s how it works.”

You don’t know how it works, Luke thought. None of you do. He remembered someone—maybe Kalisha, maybe George—telling him they’d know if he lied about seeing the dots. He guessed that was true, maybe the EEG readings showed them, but did they know this? They did not. Zeke was bluffing.

“I have seen the dots a couple of times, but I can’t read minds.”

“Hendricks and Evans think you can,” Dave said.

“I really can’t.” He looked at them with his very best honest-to-God eyes.

“We’re going to find out if that’s the truth,” Dave said. “Strip down, sport.”

With no choice, Luke took off his clothes and stepped into the tank. It was about four feet deep and eight feet across. The water was cool and pleasant; so far, so good.

“I’m thinking of an animal,” Zeke said. “What is it?”

It was a cat. Luke got no image, just the word, as big and bright as a Budweiser sign in a bar window.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, sport, if that’s how you want to play it. Take a deep breath, go under, and count to fifteen. Put a howdy-do between each number. One howdy-do, two howdy-do, three howdy-do, like that.”

Luke did it. When he emerged, Dave (last name unknown, at least so far) asked him what animal he was thinking of. The word in his mind was KANGAROO.

“I don’t know. I told you, I’m TK, not TP. And not even TK-pos.”

“Down you go,” Zeke said. “Thirty seconds, with a howdy-do between each number. I’ll be timing you, sport.”

The third dip was forty-five seconds, the fourth a full minute. He was questioned after each one. They switched from animals to the names of various caretakers: Gladys, Norma, Pete, Priscilla.

“I can’t!” Luke shouted, wiping water from his eyes. “Don’t you get that?”

“What I get is we’re going to try for a minute and a quarter,” Zeke said. “And while you’re counting, think about how long you want to keep this up. It’s in your hands, sport.”

Luke tried to surface after he’d counted to sixty-seven. Zeke grabbed his head and pushed him back down. He came up at a minute-fifteen gasping for air, his heart pounding.

“What sports team am I thinking about?” Dave asked, and in his mind Luke saw a bright bar sign reading VIKINGS.

“I don’t know!”

“Bullshit,” Zeke said. “Let’s go for a minute-thirty.”

“No,” Luke said, splashing back toward the center of the tank. He was trying not to panic. “I can’t.”

Zeke rolled his eyes. “Stop being a pussy. Abalone fishermen can go under for nine minutes. All I want is ninety seconds. Unless you tell your Uncle Dave here what his favorite sports team is.”

“He’s not my uncle and I can’t do that. Now let me out.” And because he couldn’t help it: “Please.”

Zeke unholstered his zap-stick and made a production of turning the dial up to max. “You want me to touch this to the water? I do that and you’ll dance like Michael Jackson. Now get over here.”

With no choice, Luke waded toward the edge of the immersion tank. It’s fun, Richardson had said.

“One more chance,” Zeke said. “What’s he thinking of?”

Vikings, Minnesota Vikings, my hometown team.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Zeke said, sounding regretful. “USN Luke now submerging.”

“Wait, give him a few secs to get ready,” Dave said. He looked worried, and that worried Luke. “Flood your lungs with air, Luke. And try to be calm. When your body’s on red alert, it uses more oxy.”

Luke gasped in and out half a dozen times and submerged. Zeke’s hand came down on his head and gripped his hair. Calm, calm, calm, Luke thought. Also, You fucker, Zeke, you fucker, I hate your sadistic guts.

He made the ninety seconds and came up gasping. Dave dried his face with a towel. “Stop this,” he murmured in Luke’s ear. “Just tell me what I’m thinking. This time it’s a movie star.”

MATT DAMON, the bar sign in Dave’s head now said.

“I don’t know.” Luke began to cry, the tears running down his wet face.

Zeke said, “Fine. Let’s go for a minute forty-five. One hundred and five big seconds, and don’t forget to put a howdy-do between each one. We’ll turn you into an abalone fisherman yet.”

Luke hyperventilated again, but by the time he reached one hundred, counting in his head, he felt sure he was going to open his mouth and suck in water. They would haul him out, resuscitate him, and do it again. They would keep on until he either told them what they wanted to hear or drowned.

At last the hand on his head was gone. He surged up, gasping and coughing. They gave him time to recover, then Zeke said, “Never mind the animals and sports teams and the whatever. Just say it. Say ‘I’m a telep, I’m TP,’ and this stops.”

“Okay! Okay, I’m a telep!”

“Great!” Zeke cried. “Progress! What number am I thinking of?”

The bright bar sign read 17.

“Six,” Luke said.

Zeke made a game-show buzzer sound. “Sorry, it was seventeen. Two minutes this time.”

“No! I can’t! Please!”

Dave spoke quietly. “Last one, Luke.”

Zeke gave his colleague a shoulder-shove almost hard enough to knock him off his feet. “Don’t tell him what might not be true.” He returned his attention to Luke. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to get fully aerated, and then down you go. Olympic Diving Team, baby.”

With no choice, Luke inhaled and exhaled rapidly, but long before he could count to thirty in his head, Zeke’s hand closed on his hair and shoved him down.

Luke opened his eyes and stared at the white side of the tank. The paint was scratched in a couple of places, maybe by the fingernails of other children subjected to this torture, which was reserved strictly for pinks. And why? It was pretty obvious. Because Hendricks and Evans thought the range of psychic talents could be expanded, and pinks were expendable.

Expand, expend, he thought. Expand, expend. Calm, calm, calm.

And although he tried his best to enter a Zenlike state, his lungs eventually demanded more air. His Zenlike state, which hadn’t been very Zenlike to begin with, broke down when he thought that if he survived this he’d be forced to go two minutes and fifteen, then two minutes and thirty, then—

He began to thrash. Zeke held him down. He planted his feet and pushed, almost made it to the surface, but Zeke added his other hand and pushed him down again. The dots came back, flashing in front of his eyes, rushing toward him, pulling back, then rushing toward him again. They started to swirl around him like a carousel gone crazy. Luke thought, The Stasi Lights. I’m going to drown looking at the—

Zeke hauled him up by the hair. His white tunic was soaked. He looked fixedly at Luke. “I’m going to put you down again, Luke. Again and again and again. I’ll put you down until you drown and then we’ll resuscitate you and drown you again and resuscitate you again. Last chance: what number am I thinking of?”

“I don’t…” Luke retched out water. “… know!”

That fixed gaze remained for perhaps five seconds. Luke met it, although his eyes were gushing tears. Then Zeke said, “Fuck this and fuck you, sport. Dave, dry him off and send him back. I don’t want to look at his little cunt face.”

He left, slamming the door.

Luke floundered from the pool, staggered, almost fell. Dave steadied him, then handed him a towel. Luke dried himself and got back into his clothes as fast as he could. He didn’t want to be anywhere near this man or this place, but even feeling half-dead, his curiosity remained. “Why is it so important? Why is it so important when it isn’t even what we’re here for?”

“How would you know what you’re here for?” Dave asked.

“Because I’m not stupid, that’s why.”

“You want to keep your mouth shut, Luke,” Dave said. “I like you, but that doesn’t mean I want to listen to you run your mouth.”

“Whatever the dots are for, it doesn’t have anything to do with finding out if I can go both ways, TP as well as TK. What are you guys doing? Do you even kn—”

Dave slapped him, a big roundhouse that knocked Luke off his feet. Water puddled on the tile floor soaked into the seat of his jeans. “I’m not here to answer your questions.” He bent toward Luke. “We know what we’re doing, smartass! We know exactly what we’re doing!” And, as he hauled Luke up: “We had a kid here last year who lasted three and a half minutes. He was a pain in the ass, but at least he had balls!”

12

Avery came to his room, concerned, and Luke told him to go away, he needed to be alone for awhile.

“It was bad, wasn’t it?” Avery asked. “The tank. I’m sorry, Luke.”

“Thanks. Now go away. We’ll talk later.”

“Okay.”

Avery went, considerately closing the door behind him. Luke lay on his back, trying not to relive those endless minutes submerged in the tank and doing it anyway. He kept waiting for the lights to come back, bobbing and racing through his field of vision, turning circles and making dizzy whirlpools. When they didn’t, he began to calm. One thought trumped all others, even his fear that the dots might come back… and stay this time.

Get out. I have to get out. And if I can’t do that, I have to die before they take me to Back Half and take the rest of me.

13

The worst of the bugs had departed with June, so Dr. Hendricks met with Zeke Ionidis in front of the administration building, where there was a bench under a shady oak tree. Nearby was a flagpole, with the stars and stripes flapping lazily in a light summer breeze. Dr. Hendricks held Luke’s folder on his lap.

“You’re sure,” he said to Zeke.

“Positive. I dunked the little bastard five or six times, I guess, each one fifteen seconds longer, just like you said. If he could read minds, he would have done it, and you can take that to the bank. A Navy SEAL couldn’t stand up to that shit, let alone a kid not old enough to have more than six hairs on his balls.”

Hendricks seemed ready to push it, then sighed and shook his head. “All right. I can live with that. We’ve got plenty of pinks right now, and more due in. An embarrassment of riches. But it’s still a disappointment. I had hopes for that boy.”

He opened the file with its little pink dot in the upper righthand corner. He took a pen from his pocket and drew a diagonal line across the first page. “At least he’s healthy. Evans gave him a clean bill. That idiot girl—Benson—didn’t pass her chicken pox on to him.”

“He wasn’t vaccinated against that?” Zeke asked.

“He was, but she took pains to swap spit with him. And she had quite a serious case. Couldn’t risk it. Nope. Better safe than sorry.”

“So when does he go to Back Half?”

Hendricks smiled a little. “Can’t wait to get rid of him, can you?”

“Actually, no,” Zeke said. “The Benson girl might not have infected him with chicken pox, but Wilholm passed on his fuck-you germ.”

“He goes as soon as I get a green light from Heckle and Jeckle.”

Zeke pretended to shiver. “Those two. Brrr. Creepy.”

Hendricks advanced no opinion on the Back Half doctors. “You’re sure he’s flat as far as telepathy goes?”

Zeke patted him on the shoulder. “Absolutely, Doc. Take it to the bank.”

14

While Hendricks and Zeke were discussing his future, Luke was on his way to lunch. As well as terrorizing him, the immersion tank had left him ravenously hungry. When Stevie Whipple asked where he’d been and what was wrong, Luke just shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about the tank. Not now, not ever. He supposed it was like being in a war. You got drafted, you went, but you didn’t want to talk about what you’d seen, or what had happened to you there.

Full of the caff’s version of fettuccini alfredo, he took a nap and awoke feeling marginally better. He went looking for Maureen and spied her in the formerly deserted East Wing. It seemed the Institute might soon be hosting more guests. He walked down to her and asked if she needed help. “Because I wouldn’t mind earning some tokens,” he said.

“No, I’m fine.” To Luke she looked like she was ageing almost by the hour. Her face was dead pale. He wondered how long it would be before someone noticed her condition and made her stop working. He didn’t like to think about what might become of her if that happened. Was there a retirement program for housekeepers who were also Institute snitches? He doubted it.

Her laundry basket was half filled with fresh linen, and Luke dropped his own note into it. He had written it on a memo sheet he’d stolen from the equipment alcove in C-4, along with a cheap ballpoint pen which he’d hidden under his mattress. Stamped on the barrel of the pen was DENNISON RIVER BEND REALTY. Maureen saw the folded note, covered it with a pillowcase, and gave him a slight nod. Luke went on his way.

That night in bed, he whispered to Avery for a long time before allowing the kid to go to sleep. There were two scripts, he told Avery, there had to be. He thought the Avester understood. Or maybe the right word was hoped.

Luke stayed awake a long time, listening to Avery’s light snores and meditating on escape. The idea seemed simultaneously absurd and perfectly possible. There were those dusty surveillance bulbs, and all the times he had been left alone to wander, gathering in his little bits and bobs of information. There were the fake surveillance dead zones that Sigsby and her minions knew about, and the real one that they didn’t (or so he hoped). In the end, it was a pretty simple equation. He had to try. The alternative was the Stasi Lights, the movies, the headaches, the sparkler that triggered whatever it triggered. And at the end of it all, the drone.

When they stop testing, you might only have 3 days.

15

The following afternoon, Trevor Stackhouse joined Mrs. Sigsby in her office. She was bent over an open file, reading and making notes. She raised a single finger without looking up. He went to her window, which looked out on the East Wing of the building they called the Residence Hall, as if the Institute really were a college campus, one that happened to be situated in the deep woods of northern Maine. He could see two or three kids milling around snack and soda machines that had just been restocked. There was no tobacco or alcohol available in that lounge, hadn’t been since 2005. The East Wing was usually thinly populated or not populated at all, and when there were residents boarded there, they could get cigarettes and wine nips from the vending machines at the other end of the building. Some only sampled, but a surprising number—usually those who were the most depressed and terrified by the sudden catastrophic change in their lives—became addicted quickly. Those were the ones who gave the least trouble, because they didn’t just want tokens, they needed them. Karl Marx had called religion the opiate of the people, but Stackhouse begged to differ. He thought Lucky Strikes and Boone’s Farm (greatly favored by their female guests) did the job quite nicely.

“Okay,” Mrs. Sigsby said, closing her file. “Ready for you, Trevor.”

“Four more coming in tomorrow from Opal team,” Stackhouse said. His hands were clasped behind his back and his feet were spread apart. Like a captain on the foredeck of his ship, Mrs. Sigsby thought. He was wearing one of his trademark brown suits, which she would have thought a terrible choice for midsummer, but he no doubt considered it part of his image. “We haven’t had this many onboard since 2008.”

He turned from the view, which really wasn’t that interesting. Sometimes—often, even—he got very tired of children. He didn’t know how teachers did it, especially without the freedom to whack the insolent and administer a splash of electricity to the rebellious, like the now departed Nicholas Wilholm.

Mrs. Sigsby said, “There was a time—long before yours and mine—when there were over a hundred children here. There was a waiting list.”

“All right, there was a waiting list. Good to know. Now what did you call me here for? The Opal team is in place, and at least one of these pickups is going to be delicate. I’m flying out tonight. The kid’s in a closely supervised environment.”

“A rehab, you mean.”

“That is correct.” High-functioning TKs seemed to get along relatively well in society, but similarly high-functioning TPs had problems, and often turned to booze or drugs. They damped the torrent of input, Stackhouse supposed. “But she’s worth it. Not up there with the Dixon boy—he’s a powerhouse—but close. So tell me what’s concerning you, and let me go about my business.”

“Not a concern, just a heads-up. And don’t hover behind me, it gives me the willies. Drag up a rock.”

While he got the visitor’s chair from the other side of her desk, Mrs. Sigsby opened a video file on her desktop and started it playing. It showed the snack machines outside the cafeteria. The picture was cloudy, it jittered every ten seconds or so, and was occasionally interrupted by static frizz. Mrs. Sigsby paused it during one of these.

“The first thing I want you to notice,” she said, using the dry lecture-hall voice he had so come to dislike, “is the quality of this video. It’s totally unacceptable. The same is true of at least half the surveillance cams. The one in that shitty little convenience store in the Bend is better than most of ours.” Meaning Dennison River Bend, and it was true.

“I’ll pass that on, but we both know the basic infrastructure of this place is shit. The last total renovation was forty years ago, when things in this country were different. A lot looser. As it stands, we have just two IT guys, and one of them is currently on leave. The computer equipment is outdated, and so are the generators. You know all this.”

Mrs. Sigsby absolutely did. It wasn’t lack of funds; it was their inability to bring in outside help. Your basic catch-22, in other words. The Institute had to stay airtight, and in the age of social media and hackers, that became ever more difficult. Even a whisper of what they were up to out here would be the kiss of death. For the vitally important work they did, yes, but also for the staff. It made hiring hard, it made resupply hard, and repairs were a nightmare.

“That fritzing is coming from kitchen equipment,” he said. “Mixers, garbage disposals, the microwaves. I might be able to get something done about that.”

“Perhaps you can even get something done about the bulbs in which the cameras are enclosed. Something low-tech. I believe it’s called ‘dusting.’ We do have janitors.”

Stackhouse looked at his watch.

“All right, Trevor. I can take a hint.” She started the video again. Maureen Alvorson appeared with her cleaning basket. She was accompanied by two residents: Luke Ellis and Avery Dixon, the exceptional TP-pos who was now bunking in with Ellis most nights. The video might have been substandard, but the audio was good.

“We can talk here,” Maureen told the boys. “There’s a mic, but it hasn’t worked for years. Just smile a lot, so if anyone looks at the video, they think you’re buttering me up for tokens. Now what’s on your minds? And keep it short.”

There was a pause. The little boy scratched at his arms, pinched his nostrils, then looked at Luke. So Dixon was only along for the ride. This was Ellis’s deal. Stackhouse wasn’t surprised; Ellis was the smart one. The chess player.

“Well,” Luke said, “it’s about what happened in the cafeteria. To Harry and the little Gs. That’s what’s on our minds.”

Maureen sighed and put down her basket. “I heard about it. It was too bad, but from what I hear, they’re okay.”

“Really? All three of them?”

Maureen paused. Avery was staring up at her anxiously, scratching his arms, pinching his nose, and generally looking like he needed to pee. She said finally, “Maybe not okay right now, at least not completely, I heard Dr. Evans say they were taken to the infirmary in Back Half. They have a fine one there.”

“What else do they have—”

“Quiet.” She raised a hand to Luke and looked around. The picture fritzed, but the sound stayed clear. “Don’t you ask me about Back Half. I can’t talk about that, except to say it’s nice, nicer than Front Half, and after the boys and girls spend some time there, they go back home.”

She had her arms around them when the video cleared. Holding them close. “Look at that,” Stackhouse said admiringly. “Mother Courage. She’s good.”

“Hush,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

Luke asked Maureen if she was absolutely sure Harry and Greta were alive. “Because they looked… well… dead.”

“Yeah, all the kids are saying that,” Avery agreed, and gave his nose a particularly vicious honk. “Harry spazzed out and stopped breathing. Greta’s head looked all crooked and weird on her neck.”

Maureen didn’t rush ahead; Stackhouse could see her choosing her words. He thought she might have made a decent intelligence agent in a place where intelligence-gathering actually mattered. Meanwhile, both boys were looking up at her, waiting.

At last she said, “Of course I wasn’t there, and I know it must have been scary, but I have to think it looked much worse than it was.” She stopped again, but after Avery gave his nose another comforting squeeze, she pushed on. “If the Cross boy had a seizure—I said if—they’ll be giving him the correct medication. As for Greta, I was passing the break room and heard Dr. Evans tell Dr. Hendricks she’s suffering from a sprained neck. They probably put her in a brace. Her sister must be with her. For comfort, you know.”

“Okay,” Luke said, sounding relieved. “As long as you’re sure.”

“As sure as I can be, that’s all I can tell you, Luke. A fair amount of lying goes on in this place, but I was raised not to lie to folks, especially not to children. So all I can say is I’m as sure as I can be. Now why is it so important? Just because you’re worried about your friends, or is there something more?”

Luke looked at Avery, who gave his nose an actual yank, then nodded.

Stackhouse rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, kid, if you have to pick it, go on and pick it. The foreplay is driving me crazy.”

Mrs. Sigsby paused the video. “It’s a self-comforting gesture, and better than grabbing his basket. I’ve had a fair number of crotch-grabbers in my time, girls as well as boys. Now be quiet. This is the interesting part.”

“If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it to yourself?” Luke asked.

She thought this over while Avery continued to torture his poor schnozz. Then she nodded.

Luke lowered his voice. Mrs. Sigsby turned up the volume.

“Some of the kids are talking about going on a hunger strike. No more food until we can be sure the little Gs and Harry are all right.”

Maureen lowered her own voice. “Which kids?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Luke said. “Some of the new ones.”

“You tell them that would be a very bad idea. You’re a smart boy, Luke, very smart, and I’m sure you know what the word reprisals means. You can explain it to Avery later.” She looked fixedly at the younger boy, who withdrew from her arm and put a protective hand to his nose, as if he were afraid she meant to grab it herself, maybe even pull it off. “Now I have to go. I don’t want you guys to get in trouble, and I don’t want to get in trouble myself. If someone asks what we were talking about—”

“Coaxing you for chores to get more tokes,” Avery said. “Got it.”

“Good.” She glanced up at the camera, started away, then turned back. “You’ll be out of here soon, and back home. Until then, be smart. Don’t rock the boat.”

She grabbed a dust rag, gave the delivery tray of the booze-dispensing machine a quick wipe, then picked up her basket and left. Luke and Avery lingered a moment or two, then also went on their way. Mrs. Sigsby killed the video.

“Hunger strike,” Stackhouse said, smiling. “That’s a new one.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Sigsby agreed.

“The very idea fills me with terror.” His smile widened into a grin. Siggers might disapprove, but he couldn’t help it.

To his surprise, she actually laughed. When had he last heard her do that? The correct answer might be never. “It does have its funny side. Growing children would make the world’s worst hunger strikers. They’re eating machines. But you’re right, it’s something new under the sun. Which of the new intakes do you think floated it?”

“Oh, come on. None of them. We’ve only got one kid smart enough to even know what a hunger strike is, and he’s been here for almost a month.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “And I’ll be glad when he’s out of Front Half. Wilholm was an annoyance, but at least he was out front with his anger. Ellis, though… he’s sneaky. I don’t like sneaky children.”

“How long until he’s gone?”

“Sunday or Monday, if Hallas and James in Back Half agree. Which they will. Hendricks is pretty much through with him.”

“Good. Will you address this hunger strike idea, or let it go? I’d suggest letting it go. It’ll die a natural death, if it happens at all.”

“I believe I’ll address it. As you say, we’ve currently got a lot of residents, and it might be well to speak to them at least once en masse.”

“If you do, Ellis is probably going to figure out Alvorson’s a rat.” Given the kid’s IQ, there was no probably about it.

“Doesn’t matter. He’ll be gone in a few days, and his nose-tweaking little friend will follow soon after. Now about those surveillance cameras…”

“I’ll write a memo to Andy Fellowes before I leave tonight, and we’ll make them a priority as soon as I’m back.” He leaned forward, hands clasped, his brown eyes fixed on her steel-gray ones. “In the meantime, lighten up. You’ll give yourself an ulcer. Remind yourself at least once a day that we’re dealing with kids, not hardened criminals.”

Mrs. Sigsby made no reply, because she knew he was right. Even Luke Ellis, smart as he might be, was only a kid, and after he spent some time in Back Half, he’d still be a kid, but he wouldn’t be smart at all.

16

When Mrs. Sigsby walked into the cafeteria that night, slim and erect in a crimson suit, gray blouse, and single strand of pearls, there was no need for her to tap a spoon against a glass and call for attention. All chatter ceased at once. Techs and caretakers drifted into the doorway giving on the West Lounge. Even the kitchen staff came out, gathering behind the salad bar.

“As most of you know,” Mrs. Sigsby said in a pleasant, carrying voice, “there was an unfortunate incident here in the cafeteria two nights ago. There have been rumors and gossip that two children died in that incident. This is absolutely untrue. We do not kill children here in the Institute.”

She surveyed them. They looked back, eyes wide, food forgotten.

“In case some of you were concentrating on your fruit cocktail and not paying attention, let me repeat my last statement: we do not kill children.” She paused to let that sink in. “You did not ask to be here. We all understand that, but we do not apologize for it. You are here to serve not only your country, but the entire world. When your service is done, you will not be given medals. There will be no parades in your honor. You will not be aware of our heartfelt thanks, because before you leave, your memories of the Institute will be expunged. Wiped away, for those of you who don’t know that word.” Her eyes found Luke’s for a moment and they said But of course you know it. “Please understand that you have those thanks, nonetheless. You will be tested in your time here, and some of the tests may be hard, but you will survive and rejoin your families. We have never lost a child.”

She paused again, waiting for anyone to respond or object. Wilholm might have, but Wilholm was gone. Ellis didn’t, because direct response wasn’t his way. As a chess player, he preferred sneaky gambits to direct assault. Much good would it do him.

“Harold Cross had a brief seizure following the visual field and acuity test some of you, those who’ve had it, call ‘the dots’ or ‘the lights.’ He inadvertently struck Greta Wilcox, who was trying—admirably, I’m sure we all feel—to comfort him. She suffered a severely sprained neck, but is recovering. Her sister is with her. The Wilcox twins and Harold are to be sent home next week, and I’m sure we will send our good wishes with them.”

Her eyes again sought Luke, sitting at a table against the far wall. His little friend was with him. Dixon’s mouth was hanging agape, but at least he was leaving his nose alone for the time being.

“If anyone should contradict what I’ve just told you, you may be sure that person is lying, and his lies should be immediately reported to one of the caretakers or technicians. Is that understood?”

Silence, without even a nervous cough to break it.

“If it’s understood, I would like you to say ‘Yes, Mrs. Sigsby.’ ”

“Yes, Mrs. Sigsby,” the kids responded.

She offered a thin smile. “I think you can do better.”

“Yes, Mrs. Sigsby!”

“And now with real conviction.”

“YES, MRS. SIGSBY!” This time even the kitchen staff, techs, and caretakers joined in.

“Good.” Mrs. Sigsby smiled. “There’s nothing like an affirmative shout to clear the lungs and the mind, is there? Now carry on with your meals.” She turned to the white-coated kitchen staff. “And extra desserts before bedtime, assuming you can provide cake and ice cream, Chef Doug?”

Chef Doug made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Someone began to clap. Others joined in. Mrs. Sigsby nodded right and left to acknowledge the applause as she left the room, walking with her head up and her hands swinging back and forth in tiny, precise arcs. A small smile, what Luke thought of as a Mona Lisa smile, curved the corners of her mouth. The white-coats parted to let her pass.

Still applauding, Avery leaned close to Luke and whispered, “She lied about everything.”

Luke gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“That fucking bitch,” Avery said.

Luke gave the same tiny nod and sent a brief mental message: Keep clapping.

17

That night Luke and Avery lay side by side in Luke’s bed as the Institute wound down for another night.

Avery whispered, recounting everything Maureen told him each time he went to his nose, signaling her to send. Luke had been afraid Maureen might not understand the note he’d dropped into her basket (a little unconscious prejudice there, maybe based on the brown housekeeper’s uni she wore, he’d have to work on that), but she had understood perfectly, and provided Avery with the step-by-step list. Luke thought the Avester could have been a little more subtle about the signals, but it seemed to have turned out okay. He had to hope it had. Supposing that were true, Luke’s only real question was whether or not the first step could actually work. It was simple to the point of crudity.

The two boys lay on their backs, staring into the dark. Luke was going over the steps for the tenth time—or maybe the fifteenth—when Avery invaded his mind with three words that flashed on like a red neon, then faded out, leaving an afterimage.

Yes, Mrs. Sigsby.

Luke poked him.

Avery sniggered.

A few seconds later, the words came again, this time even brighter.

Yes, Mrs. Sigsby!

Luke gave him another poke, but he was smiling, and Avery probably knew it, dark or not. The smile was in his mind as well as on his mouth, and Luke thought he had a right to it. He might not be able to escape the Institute—he had to admit the odds were against—but today had been a good one. Hope was such a fine word, such a fine thing to feel.

YES, MRS. SIGSBY, YOU FUCKING BITCH!

“Stop, or I’ll tickle you,” Luke murmured.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Avery whispered. “It really worked. Do you think you can really…”

“I don’t know, I only know I’m going to try. Now shut up and go to sleep.”

“I wish you could take me with you. I wish it bad.”

“Me too,” Luke said, and he meant it. It would be tough for Avery here on his own. He was more socially adjusted than the little Gs or Stevie Whipple, but nobody was ever going to crown him Mr. Personality.

“When you come back, bring about a thousand cops with you,” Avery whispered. “And do it fast, before they take me to Back Half. Do it while we can still save Sha.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Luke promised. “Now stop yelling in my head. That joke wears out fast.”

“I wish you had more TP. And that it didn’t hurt you to send. We could talk better.”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. For the last time, go to sleep.”

Avery did, and Luke began to drift off himself. Maureen’s first step was as clanky as the ice machine where they sometimes talked, but he had to admit that it tallied with all the things he’d already observed: dusty camera housings, baseboards where paint had chipped off years ago and had never been touched up, an elevator card carelessly left behind. He mused again on how this place was like a rocket with its engines off, still moving but now in an inertial glide.

18

The next day Winona escorted him down to C-Level, where he was given a quick once-over: blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, O2 level. When Luke asked what came next, Dave checked his clipboard, gave him a sunny grin—as if he had never knocked him to the floor—and said there was nothing on the schedule.

“You’ve got an off-day, Luke. Enjoy it.” He raised his hand, palm out.

Luke grinned back and slapped him five, but it was Maureen’s note he was thinking of: When they stop testing, you might only have 3 days.

“What about tomorrow?” he asked as they returned to the elevator.

“We’ll let tomorrow take care of itself,” Dave said. “It’s the only way to be.”

Maybe that was true for some, but it was no longer true for Luke. He wished for extra time to go over Maureen’s plan—or to procrastinate, more like it—but he was afraid that his time was almost up.

Dodgeball had become a daily affair on the Institute’s playground, almost a ritual, and nearly everyone joined in at least for awhile. Luke got in the circle and jostled around with the other dodgers for ten minutes or so before allowing himself to be hit. Instead of joining the throwers, he walked across the asphalt half-court, past Frieda Brown, who was standing by herself and taking foul shots. Luke thought she still had no real idea where she was. He sat down on the gravel with his back against the chainlink fence. At least the bug situation was a little better now. He dropped his hands and swept them idly back and forth at his sides, eyes on the dodgeball game.

“Want to shoot some?” Frieda asked.

“Maybe later,” Luke said. He casually reached one hand behind him, felt for the bottom of the fence, and found that yes, Maureen was right; there was a gap where the ground slumped a bit. That slump might have been created by snowmelt in the early spring. Only an inch or two, but it was there. Nobody had bothered to fill it in. Luke’s upturned hand rested on the exposed bottom of the fence, the wire tines pressing into his palm. He waggled his fingertips in the free air outside the Institute for a moment or two, then got up, dusted off his bottom, and asked Frieda if she wanted to play HORSE. She gave him an eager smile that said Yes! Of course! Be my friend!

It sort of broke his heart.

19

Luke had no tests the following day, either, and nobody even bothered taking his vitals. He helped Connie, one of the janitors, carry two mattresses from the elevator to a couple of rooms in the East Wing, got a single lousy token for his trouble (all the janitors were miserly when it came to handing out tokes), and on his way back to his room, he encountered Maureen standing by the ice machine, drinking from the bottle of water she always kept chilling in there. He asked if she needed any help.

“No, I’m fine.” Then, lowering her voice: “Hendricks and Zeke were talking out front by the flagpole. I saw them. Have they been testing you?”

“No. Not for two days.”

“That’s what I thought. This is Friday. You might have until Saturday or Sunday, but I wouldn’t take that chance.” The mixture of worry and compassion he saw on her haggard face terrified him.

Tonight.

He didn’t speak the word aloud, only mouthed it with a hand at the side of his face, scratching below his eye. She nodded.

“Maureen… do they know you have…” He couldn’t finish, and didn’t have to.

“They think it’s sciatica.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Hendricks might have an idea, but he doesn’t care. None of them do, as long as I can keep working. Go on now, Luke. I’ll turn your room while you’re at lunch. Look under your mattress when you go to bed. Good luck.” She hesitated. “I wish I could hug you, son.”

Luke felt his eyes fill up. He hurried away before she could see.

He ate a big lunch, although he wasn’t particularly hungry. He would do the same at supper. He had a feeling that if this worked, he was going to need all the fuel he could take on.

That evening at dinner, he and Avery were joined by Frieda, who seemed to have imprinted on Luke. After, they went out to the playground. Luke declined to shoot more hoops with the girl, saying he would spot Avery for awhile on the trampoline.

One of those red neon words bloomed in Luke’s mind as he watched the Avester jump up and down, doing lackadaisical seat-drops and tummy-bounces.

Tonight?

Luke shook his head. “But I need you to sleep in your own room. I’d like to get a full eight hours for once.”

Avery slid off the trampoline and looked at Luke solemnly. “Don’t tell me what isn’t true because you think someone will see me looking sad and wonder why. I don’t have to look sad.” And he stretched his lips in a hopelessly counterfeit grin.

Okay. Just don’t fuck up my chance, Avester.

Come back for me if you can. Please.

I will.

The dots were returning, bringing a vivid memory of the immersion tank. Luke thought it was the effort it took to consciously send his thoughts.

Avery looked at him a moment longer, then ran to the basketball hoop. “Want to play HORSE, Frieda?”

She looked down on him and gave him a smile. “Kid, I’d beat you like a drum.”

“Spot me an H and an O, and we’ll see about that.”

They played as the light began to drain out of the day. Luke crossed the playground and looked back once as Avery—who Harry Cross had once called Luke’s “little bitty buddy”—attempted a hook shot that missed everything. He thought Avery would come down to his room that night at least long enough to retrieve his toothbrush, but he didn’t.

20

Luke played a few games of Slap Dash and 100 Balls on his laptop, then brushed his own teeth, undressed to his shorts, and got into bed. He turned off the lamp and reached under his mattress. He might have cut his fingers on the knife Maureen had left him (unlike the plastic ones they got in the caff, this felt like a paring knife with a real blade) if she hadn’t wrapped it in a washcloth. There was something else as well, something he could identify by touch. God knew he’d used plenty of them before coming here. A flash drive. He leaned over in the dark and slipped both items into the pocket of his pants.

Then came waiting. For awhile kids ran up and down the corridor, maybe playing tag, maybe just grab-assing around. This happened every night now that there were more kids. There were whoops and laughter, followed by exaggerated hushing sounds, followed by more laughter. They were blowing off steam. Blowing off fear. One of tonight’s loudest whoopers was Stevie Whipple, and Luke deduced that Stevie had been into the wine or hard lemonade. There were no stern adults demanding silence; those in charge weren’t interested in enforcing noise-abatement rules or imposing curfews.

Finally Luke’s part of the residence floor settled down. Now there was just the sound of his own steadily beating heart and the turn of his thoughts as he went over Maureen’s list for the final time.

Back to the trampoline once you’re out, he reminded himself. Use the knife if you have to. Then a slight turn to the right.

If he got out.

He was relieved to find himself eighty per cent determined and only twenty per cent afraid. Even that much fear made no real sense, but Luke supposed it was natural. What drove the determination—what he absolutely knew—was simple and stark: this was his chance, the only one he’d have, and he intended to make the most of it.

When the corridor outside had been silent for what he judged to be half an hour, Luke got out of bed and grabbed his plastic ice bucket from on top of his TV. He had made up a story for the watchers—if, that was, anyone was actually watching the monitors at this hour, and not just sitting in some lower level surveillance room and playing solitaire.

This story was about a kid who goes to bed early, then awakens for some reason, maybe a need to pee, maybe because of a nightmare. Anyway, the kid is still more asleep than awake, so he walks down the hall in his underwear. Cameras in dusty bulbs watch him as he goes to the ice machine for a refill. And when he returns with not just a bucket of ice but the scoop as well, they assume the kid’s just too dozey to realize he still has it in his hand. He’ll see it in the morning, lying on his desk or in the bathroom sink, and wonder how it got there.

In his room again, Luke put some ice in a glass, filled it from the bathroom tap, and drank half of it down. It was good. His mouth and throat were very dry. He left the scoop on the toilet tank and went back to bed. He tossed and turned. He muttered to himself. Maybe the kid in the story he was making up is missing his little bitty buddy. Maybe that’s why he can’t get back to sleep. And maybe nobody’s watching or listening, but maybe somebody is, and that’s the way he has to play it.

Finally he turned on the lamp again and got dressed. He went into the bathroom, where there was no surveillance (probably no surveillance) and stuck the scoop down the front of his pants, dropping his Twins tee-shirt over it. If there was video in here, and if someone was monitoring it, he was probably cooked already. There was nothing he could do about that but push on to the next part of his story.

He left the room and went down the hall to the lounge. Stevie Whipple and some other kid, one of the newbies, were there, lying on the floor fast asleep. Half a dozen Fireball nips, all empty, were scattered around them. Those little bottles represented a lot of tokens. Stevie and his new friend would wake up with hangovers and empty pockets.

Luke stepped over Stevie and went into the caff. With only the salad bar fluorescents lit, the place was gloomy and a little spooky. He grabbed an apple from the never-empty bowl of fruit and took a bite as he wandered back into the lounge, hoping no one was watching, hoping that if someone was, they would understand the pantomime he was acting out, and buy it. The kid woke up. The kid got ice from the machine and had a nice cold glass of water, but after that he’s more awake than ever, so he goes up to the caff for something to eat. Then the kid thinks, Hey, why not go out to the playground for awhile, get some fresh air. He wouldn’t be the first one to do that; Kalisha said that she and Iris had gone out several times to look at the stars—they were incredibly bright out here with no light pollution to obscure them. Or sometimes, she said, kids used the playground at night to make out. He just hoped no one was out here stargazing or necking tonight.

There wasn’t, and with no moon the playground was fairly dark, the various pieces of equipment only angular shadows. Without a buddy or two for company, little kids had a tendency to be afraid of the dark. Bigger kids, too, although most wouldn’t admit it.

Luke strolled across the playground, waiting for one of the less familiar night caretakers to appear and ask him what he was doing out here with that scoop hidden under his shirt. Surely he wasn’t thinking about escape, was he? Because that would be pretty darn wacky!

“Wacky,” Luke murmured, and sat down with his back to the chainlink fence. “That’s me, a real whackjob.”

He waited to see if someone would come. No one did. There was only the sound of crickets and the hoot of an owl. There was a camera, but was anybody really monitoring it? There was security, he knew that, but it was sloppy security. He knew that, too. Just how sloppy he would now find out.

He lifted his shirt and removed the scoop. In his imaginings of this part, he scooped behind his back with his right hand, maybe shifting over to his left when his arm got tired. In reality, this didn’t work very well. He scraped the scoop against the bottom of the chainlink repeatedly, making a noise that sounded very loud in the stillness, and he couldn’t see if he was making any progress.

This is crazy, he thought.

Throwing worry about the camera aside, Luke got on his knees and began to dig under the fence, flinging gravel to the right and the left. Time seemed to stretch out. He felt that hours were passing. Was anyone in that surveillance room he’d never seen (but could imagine vividly) starting to wonder why the kid with insomnia hadn’t come back from the playground? Would he or she send someone to check? And say, what if that camera has a night-vision feature, Lukey? What about that?

He dug. He could feel sweat starting to oil his face, and the bugs working the night shift were homing in on it. He dug. He could smell his armpits. His heart had sped up to a gallop. He felt someone standing behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw only the gantry of the basketball post standing against the stars.

Now he had a trench under the bottom of the fence. Shallow, but he had come to the Institute skinny and had lost more weight since then. Maybe—

But when he lay down and tried to slide under, the fence stopped him. It wasn’t even close.

Go back in. Go back in and get into bed before they find you and do something horrible to you for trying to get out of here.

But that wasn’t an option, only cowardice. They were going to do something horrible to him: the movies, the headaches, the Stasi Lights… and finally, the drone.

He dug, gasping now, going back and forth, left and right. The gap between the bottom of the fence and the ground slowly deepened. So stupid of them to have left the surface unpaved on either side of the fence. So stupid not to have run an electrical charge, even a mild one, through the wire. But they hadn’t, and here he was.

He lay down again, tried again to ease under, and again the bottom of the fence stopped him. But he was close. Luke got on his knees again and dug more, dug faster, left and right, back and forth, to and fro. There was a snapping sound when the scoop’s handle finally let go. Luke tossed the handle aside and went on digging, feeling the edge of the scoop bite into his palms. When he paused to look at them, he saw they were bleeding.

Got to be this time. Got to be.

But he still couldn’t… quite… fit.

And so back to work with the scoop. Left and right, starboard and larboard. Blood was dripping down his fingers, his hair was sweat-pasted to his forehead, mosquitoes sang in his ears. He put the scoop aside, lay down, and tried again to slide under the fence. The protruding tines pulled his shirt sideways, then bit into his skin, drawing more blood from his shoulderblades. He kept going.

Halfway under, he stuck. He stared at the gravel, saw the way dust puffed up in tiny swirls below his nostrils as he panted. He had to go back, had to dig deeper yet—maybe only a little. Except when he tried to edge back into the playground, he discovered he couldn’t go that way, either. Not just stuck, caught. He would still be here, trapped under this goddam fucking fence like a rabbit in a trap when the sun came up tomorrow morning.

The dots started to come back, red and green and purple, emerging from the bottom of the dug-up ground that was only an inch or two from his eyes. They rushed toward him, breaking apart, coming together, spinning and strobing. Claustrophobia squeezed his heart, squeezed his head. His hands throbbed and sang.

Luke reached out, hooked his fingers into the dirt, and pulled with everything he had. For a moment the dots filled not only his field of vision but his entire brain; he was lost in their light. Then the bottom of the fence seemed to rise a little. That might have been strictly imagination, but he didn’t think so. He heard it creak.

Maybe thanks to the shots and the tank, I’m a TK-pos now, he thought. Just like George.

He decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he had begun to move once more.

The dots subsided. If the bottom of the fence really had risen, it had come back down. Metal prongs scored not just his shoulderblades but his buttocks and thighs. There was an agonizing moment when he stopped again, the fence grasping him greedily, not wanting to let go, but when he turned his head and laid his cheek on the pebbly ground, he could see a bush. It might be in reach. He stretched, came up short, stretched some more, and grasped it. He pulled. The bush began to tear free, but before it could come entirely out of the ground, he was moving again, thrusting with his hips and pushing with his feet. A protruding fence tine gave him a goodbye kiss, drawing a hot line across one calf, and then he wriggled through to the far side of the fence.

He was out.

Luke swayed to his knees and cast a wild look back, sure he’d see all the lights coming on—not just in the lounge, but in the hallways and the cafeteria, and in their glow he would see running figures: caretakers with their zap-sticks unholstered and turned up to maximum power.

There was no one.

He got to his feet and began to run blindly, the vital next step—orientation—forgotten in his panic. He might have run into the woods and become lost there before reason reasserted itself, except for the sudden scorching pain in his left heel as he came down on a sharp rock and realized he had lost one of his sneakers in that final desperate lunge.

Luke returned to the fence, bent, retrieved it, and put it on. His back and buttocks only smarted, but that final cut into his calf had been deeper, and burned like a hot wire. His heartbeat slowed and clear thinking returned. Once you’re out, go level with the trampoline, Avery had said, relaying the second of Maureen’s steps. Put your back to it, then turn right one medium-sized step. That’s your direction. You only have a mile or so to go, and you don’t need to keep in a perfectly straight line, what you’re aiming for is pretty big, but try your best. Later, in bed that night, Avery had said that maybe Luke could use the stars to guide him. He didn’t know about that stuff himself.

All right, then. Time to go. But there was one other thing he had to do first.

He reached up to his right ear and felt the small circle embedded there. He remembered someone—maybe Iris, maybe Helen—saying the implant hadn’t hurt her, because her ears were already pierced. Only pierced earrings unscrewed, Luke had seen his mother do it. This one was fixed in place.

Please God, don’t let me have to use the knife.

Luke steeled himself, worked his nails under the curved upper edge of the tracker, and pulled. His earlobe stretched, and it hurt, hurt plenty, but the tracker remained fixed. He let go, took two deep breaths (memories of the immersion tank recurring as he did so), and pulled again. Harder. The pain was worse this time, but the tracker remained in place and time was passing. The west residence wing, looking strange from this unfamiliar angle, was still dark and quiet, but for how long?

He thought about pulling again, but that would only be postponing the inevitable. Maureen had known; it was why she left the paring knife. He took it from his pocket (being careful not to pull out the thumb drive as well) and held it in front of his eyes in the scant starlight. He felt for the sharp edge with the ball of his thumb, then reached across his body with his left hand and pulled down on his earlobe, stretching it as far as it would go, which was not very.

He hesitated, taking a moment to let himself really understand he was on the free side of the fence. The owl hooted again, a sleepy sound. He could see fireflies stitching the dark and even in this moment of extremity realized they were beautiful.

Do it fast, he told himself. Pretend you’re slicing a piece of steak. And don’t scream no matter how much it hurts. You cannot scream.

Luke put the top of the blade against the top of his earlobe on the outside and stood that way for a few seconds that felt like a few eternities. Then he lowered the knife.

I can’t.

You must.

I can’t.

Oh God, I have to.

He placed the edge of the knife against that tender unarmored flesh again and pulled down at once, before he had time to do more than pray for the edge to be sharp enough to do the job in a single stroke.

The blade was sharp, but his strength failed him a little at the last moment, and instead of coming off, the earlobe dangled by a shred of gristle. At first there was no pain, just the warmth of blood flowing down the side of his neck. Then the pain came. It was as if a wasp, one as big as a pint bottle, had stung him and injected its poison. Luke inhaled in a long sibilant hiss, grasped the dangling earlobe, and pulled it off like skin from a chicken drumstick. He bent over it, knowing he had gotten the damned thing but needing to see it anyway. Needing to be positive. It was there.

Luke made sure he was even with the trampoline. He put his back to it, then turned a step—a medium one, he hoped—to the right. Ahead of him was the dark bulk of the northern Maine woods, stretching for God only knew how many miles. He looked up and spotted the Big Dipper, with one corner star straight ahead. Keep following that, he told himself. That’s all you have to do. It won’t be straight on till morning, either, she told Avery it’s only a mile or so, and then it’s on to the next step. Ignore the pain in your shoulderblades, the worse pain in your calf, the worst pain of all in your Van Gogh ear. Ignore the way your arms and legs are trembling. Get going. But first…

He drew his fisted right hand back to his shoulder and flung the scrap of flesh in which the tracker was still embedded over the fence. He heard (or imagined he heard) the small click it made as it struck the asphalt surrounding the playground’s paltry excuse for a basketball court. Let them find it there.

He began to walk, eyes up and fixed on that one single star.

21

Luke had it to guide him for less than thirty seconds. As soon as he entered the trees, it was gone. He stopped where he was, the Institute still partly visible behind him through the first interlacing branches of the woodlands.

Only a mile, he told himself, and you should find it even if you go off-course a little, because she told Avery it’s big. Fairly big, anyway. So walk slowly. You’re right-handed, which means you’re right-side dominant, so try to compensate for that, but not too much, or you’ll go off-course to the left. And keep count. A mile should be between two thousand and twenty-five hundred steps. Ballpark figure, of course, depending on the terrain. And be careful not to poke your eye out on a branch. You’ve got enough holes in you already.

Luke began walking. At least there weren’t any thickets to plow through; these were old-growth trees, which had created a lot of shade above and a thick layer of underbrush-discouraging pine duff on the ground. Every time he had to detour around one of the elderly trees (probably they were pines, but in the dark who really knew), he tried to re-orient himself and continue on a straight line which was now—he had to admit it—largely hypothetical. It was like trying to find your way across a huge room filled with barely glimpsed objects.

Something on his left made a sudden grunting sound and then ran, snapping one branch and rattling others. Luke the city boy froze in his tracks. Was that a deer? Christ, what if it was a bear? A deer would be running away, but a bear might be hungry for a midnight snack. It might be coming at him now, attracted by the smell of blood. God knew Luke’s neck and the right shoulder of his shirt were soaked with it.

Then the sound was gone, and he could only hear crickets and the occasional hoo of that owl. He had been at eight hundred steps when he heard the whatever-it-was. Now he began to walk again, holding his hands out in front of him like a blind man, ticking the steps off in his mind. A thousand… twelve hundred… here’s a tree, a real monster, the first branches far over my head, too high up to see, go around… fourteen hundred… fifteen hun—

He stumbled over a downed trunk and went sprawling. Something, a stub of branch, dug into his left leg high up, and he grunted with pain. He lay on the duff for a moment, getting his breath back, and longing—here was the ultimate, deadly absurdity—for his room back in the Institute. A room where there was a place for everything and everything was in its place and no animals of indeterminate size went crashing around in the trees. A safe place.

“Yeah, until it’s not,” he whispered, and got to his feet, rubbing the new tear in his jeans and the new tear in his skin beneath. At least they don’t have dogs, he thought, remembering some old black-and-white prison flick where a couple of chained-together cons had made a dash for freedom with a pack of bloodhounds baying behind them. Plus, those guys had been in a swamp. Where there were alligators.

See, Lukey? he heard Kalisha saying. It’s all good. Just keep going. Straight line. Straight as you can, anyway.

At two thousand steps, Luke started looking for lights up ahead, shining through the trees. There’s always a few, Maureen had told Avery, but the yellow one is the brightest. At twenty-five hundred, he began to feel anxious. At thirty-five hundred, he began to be sure he had gone off-course, and not just by a little.

It was that tree I fell over, he thought. That goddam tree. When I got up, I must have gone wrong. For all I know, I’m headed for Canada. If the Institute guys don’t find me, I’ll die in these woods.

But because going back wasn’t an option (he couldn’t have retraced his steps even if he wanted to), Luke kept walking, hands waving in front of him for branches that might try to wound him in new places. His ear throbbed.

He quit counting his steps, but he must have been around five thousand—well over two miles—when he saw a faint yellowy-orange gleam through the trees. Luke first mistook it for either a hallucination or one of the dots, soon to be joined by swarms of them. Another dozen steps put paid to those worries. The yellow-orange light was clearer, and had been joined by two more, much dimmer. Those had to be electric lights. He thought the brighter one was an arc-sodium, the kind they had in big parking lots. Rolf’s father had told them one night when he had taken Luke and Rolf to a movie at the AMC Southdale, that those kinds of lights were supposed to stop muggings and car break-ins.

Luke felt an urge to simply bolt forward and restrained it. The last thing he wanted to do was trip over another downed tree or step in a hole and break his leg. There were more lights now, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the first one. The Big Dipper hadn’t lasted long, but here was a new guiding star, a better one. Ten minutes after first spotting it, Luke came to the edge of the trees. Across fifty yards or so of open ground, there was another chainlink fence. This one was topped with barbed wire, and there were light-posts along it at roughly thirty-foot intervals. Motion-activated, Maureen had told Avery. Tell Luke to stay well back. That was advice he hardly needed.

Beyond the fence were little houses. Very little. Not enough room to swing a cat in, Luke’s own father might have said. They could contain three rooms at most, and probably just two. They were all the same. Avery said Maureen called this the village, but to Luke it looked like an Army barracks. The houses were arranged in blocks of four, with a patch of grass in the center of each block. There were lights shining in a few of the houses, probably the kind people left on in the bathroom so they wouldn’t trip over something if they had to get up and use the toilet.

There was a single street, which ended at a larger building. To either side of this building was a small parking lot filled with cars and pickup trucks parked hip to hip. Thirty or forty in all, Luke estimated. He remembered wondering where the Institute staff kept their vehicles. Now he knew, although how food was supplied was still a mystery. The arc-sodium was on a pole in front of this larger building, and it shone down on two gas pumps. Luke thought the place almost had to be some kind of store, the Institute’s version of a PX.

So now he understood a little more. Staff got time off—Maureen had had a week to go back to Vermont—but mostly they stayed right here, and when they were off-shift, they lived in those ticky-tacky little houses. Work schedules might be staggered so they could share accommodations. When in need of recreation, they hopped in their personal vehicles and drove to the nearest town, which happened to be Dennison River Bend.

The locals would certainly be curious about what these men and women were up to out there in the woods, they’d ask questions, and there had to be some sort of cover story to handle them. Luke didn’t have any idea what it might be (and at this moment couldn’t care less), but it must be pretty decent to have held up for so many years.

Go right along the fence. Look for a scarf.

Luke got moving, the fence and the village to his left, the edge of the woods to his right. Again he had to fight the urge to speed along, especially now that he could see a little better. Their time with Maureen had necessarily been short, partly because if their palaver went on too long it might raise suspicion, and partly because Luke was afraid too much of Avery’s ostentatious nose-grabbing might give the game away. As a result, he had no idea where this scarf might be, and he was afraid of missing it.

It turned out not to be a problem. Maureen had tied it to the low-hanging branch of a tall pine tree just before the place where the security fence made a left-angle turn away from the woods. Luke took it down and knotted it around his waist, not wanting to leave such an obvious marker to those who would soon be pursuing him. That made him wonder how long it would be before Mrs. Sigsby and Stackhouse found out, and realized who had helped him escape. Not long at all, probably.

Tell them everything, Maureen, he thought. Don’t make them torture you. Because if you try to hold out, they will, and you’re too old and too sick for the tank.

The bright light at the building that might be a company store was quite far behind him now, and Luke had to cast around carefully before he found the old road leading back into the forest, one that might have been used by pulp-cutting woodsmen a generation ago. Its start was screened by a thick stand of blueberry bushes, and in spite of the need he felt to hurry, he stopped long enough to pick a double handful and throw them into his mouth. They were sweet and delicious. They tasted of outside.

Once he found the old track, it was easy to follow, even in the darkness. Plenty of underbrush was growing on its eroded crown, and a double line of weeds padded what had once been wheel-ruts. There were downed branches to step over (or trip over), but it was impossible to wander back into the forest.

He tried counting steps again, managed to keep a fairly accurate tally up to four thousand, then gave up. The track rose occasionally, but mostly it tended downward. A couple of times he came to deadfalls, and once a tangle of bushes so thick he feared the old road just stopped there, but when he pushed through, he found it again and continued. He had no sense of how much time had passed. It might have been an hour; it was probably more like two. All he knew for sure was that it was still night, and although being out here in the dark was spooky, especially for a city kid, he hoped it would stay dark for a long, long time. Except it wouldn’t. At this time of year, light would start creeping back into the sky by four o’clock.

He reached the top of another rise and stopped for a moment to rest. He did this standing up. He didn’t really believe he would fall asleep if he sat down, but the thought that he might scared him. The adrenaline which had brought him scratching and scrabbling under the fence, then through the woods to the village, was all gone now. The bleeding from the cuts on his back and leg and earlobe had stopped, but all those places throbbed and stung. His ear was the worst by far. He touched it tentatively, then pulled his fingers back with a hiss of pain through clenched teeth. Not before he’d felt an irregular knob of blood and scab there, however.

I mutilated myself, he thought. That earlobe is never going to come back.

“Fuckers made me do it,” he whispered. “They made me.”

Since he didn’t dare sit, he bent over and grasped his knees, a position in which he had seen Maureen on many occasions. It did nothing for the fence slashes across his back, his sore ass, or his mutilated earlobe, but it eased his tired muscles a little. He straightened up, ready to go on, then paused. He could hear a faint sound from ahead. A kind of rushing, like the wind in the pines, but there wasn’t even a breath of breeze where he was standing on this little rise.

Don’t let it be a hallucination, he thought. Let it be real.

Another five hundred steps—these he counted—and Luke knew the sound really was running water. The track grew wider and steeper, finally steep enough that he had to walk sideways, holding onto tree branches to keep from falling on his ass. He stopped when the trees on either side disappeared. Here the woods hadn’t just been cut, but stumped as well, creating a clearing that was now overgrown with bushes. Beyond and below was a wide band of black silk, running smooth enough to reflect ripples of starlight from above. He could imagine those long-ago loggers—men who might have worked in these north woods before the Second World War—using old Ford or International Harvester logging trucks to haul their cutwood this far, maybe even teams of horses. The clearing had been their turnaround point. Here they had unloaded their pulpwood and sent it skidding down to the Dennison River, where it would start its ride to the various mill towns downstate.

Luke made his way down this last slope on legs that ached and trembled. The final two hundred feet were the steepest yet, the track sunk all the way to bedrock by the passage of those long-ago logs. He sat down and let himself slide, grabbing at bushes to slow his progress a little and finally coming to a tooth-rattling stop on a rocky bank three or four feet above the water. And here, just as Maureen had promised, the prow of a splintery old rowboat peeped from beneath a green tarp drifted with pine needles. It was tethered to a ragged stump.

How had Maureen known about this place? Had she been told? That didn’t seem sure enough, not when a boy’s life might depend on that rickety old boat. Maybe before she’d gotten sick, she had found it on a walk by herself. Or she and a few others—maybe a couple of the cafeteria women with whom she seemed friendly—had come down here from their quasi-military village to picnic: sandwiches and Cokes or a bottle of wine. It didn’t matter. The boat was here.

Luke eased himself into the water, which came up to his shins. He bent and scooped double handfuls into his mouth. The river water was cold and tasted even sweeter than the blueberries. Once his thirst was slaked, he tried to untie the rope tethering the boat to the stump, but the knots were complex, and time was passing. In the end he used the paring knife to saw through the tether, and that started his right palm bleeding again. Worse, the boat immediately began to drift away.

He lunged for it, grabbed the prow, and hauled it back. Now both of his palms were bleeding. He tried to yank off the tarp, but as soon as he let go of the boat’s prow, the current began to pull it away again. He cursed himself for not getting the tarpaulin off first. There wasn’t enough ground to beach the boat, and in the end he did the only thing he could: got his top half over the side and under the tarp with its somehow fishy smell of ancient canvas, then pulled on the splintery midships bench until he was all the way in. He landed in a puddle of water and on something long and angular. By now the boat was being pulled downstream by the gentle current, stern first.

I am having quite the adventure, Luke thought. Yes indeed, quite the adventure for me.

He sat up under the tarp. It billowed around him, producing an even stronger stink. He pushed and paddled at it with his bleeding hands until it flopped over the side. It floated beside the rowboat at first, then began to sink. The angular thing he’d landed on turned out to be an oar. Unlike the boat, it looked relatively new. Maureen had placed the scarf; had she also placed the oar for him? He wasn’t sure she was capable of making the walk down the old logging road in her current condition, let alone down that last steep slope. If she had done it, she deserved an epic poem in her honor, at the very least. And all just because he’d looked some stuff up for her on the Internet, stuff she probably could have found herself if she hadn’t been so sick? He hardly knew how to think about such a thing, let alone understand it. He only knew the oar was here, and he had to use it, tired or not, bleeding hands or not.

At least he knew how. He was a city boy, but Minnesota was the land of ten thousand lakes, and Luke had been out fishing with his paternal grandfather (who liked to call himself “just another old basshole from Mankato”) many times. He settled himself on the center seat and first used the oar to get the fore end of the boat pointed downstream. With that accomplished, he paddled out to the center of the river, which was about eighty yards wide at this point, and shipped the oar. He took off his sneakers and started to set them on the stubby aft seat to dry. Something was printed on that seat in faded black paint, and when he leaned close, he was able to read it: S.S. Pokey. That made him grin. Luke leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the crazy sprawl of the stars, and tried to convince himself that this wasn’t a dream—that he had really gotten out.

From somewhere behind him on the left came the double blast of an electric horn. He turned and saw a single bright headlight flickering through the trees, first coming level with his boat, then passing it. He couldn’t see the engine or the train it was hauling, there were too many trees in the way, but he could hear the rumble of the trucks and the bratty squall of steel wheels on steel rails. That was what finally nailed it for him. This was not some incredibly detailed fantasy going on inside his brain as he lay sleeping in his West Wing bed. That was a real train over there, probably headed for Dennison River Bend. This was a real boat he was in, sliding south on this slow and beautiful current. Those were real stars overhead. The Minions of Sigsby would come after him, of course, but—

“I’m never going to Back Half. Never.”

He put one hand over the side of the S.S. Pokey, splayed his fingers, and watched four tiny wakes speed away behind him into the dark. He had done this before, in his grandfather’s little aluminum fishing skiff with its putt-putting two-stroke engine, many times, but he had never—not even as a four-year-old to whom everything was new and amazing—been so overwhelmed by the sight of those momentary grooves. It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.

“I’ll die before I let them take me back.”

He understood that this was true, and that it might come to that, but he also understood that right now it had not. Luke Ellis raised his cut and dripping hands to the night, feeling free air rush past them, and began to cry.

22

He dozed off sitting on the midships bench, his chin on his chest, his hands dangling between his legs, his bare feet in the little puddle of water at the bottom of the boat, and might have still been sleeping as the Pokey carried him past the next stop on his improbable pilgrimage if not for the sound of another train horn, this one coming not from the riverbank but ahead and above. It was much louder, too—not a lonely honk but an imperative WHAAA that brought Luke around with such a jerk that he almost went sprawling backward into the stern. He raised his hands in an instinctive gesture of protection, realizing it was pathetic even as he did it. The horn quit and was supplanted by metallic squeals and vast hollow rumblings. Luke grabbed the sides of the boat where it narrowed toward the prow, and looked ahead with wild eyes, sure he was about to be run down.

It wasn’t quite dawn, but the sky had begun to brighten, putting a sheen on the river, which was much wider now. A quarter of a mile downstream, a freight train was crossing a trestle, slowing down. As he watched, Luke saw boxcars marked New England Land Express, Massachusetts Red, a couple of car carriers, several tankers, one marked Canadian CleanGas and another Virginia Util-X. He passed beneath the trestle and raised a hand against the soot that came sifting down. A couple of clinkers splashed into the water on either side of his craft.

Luke grabbed the paddle and began to angle the rowboat toward the righthand shore, where he could now see a few sad-looking buildings with boarded-up windows and a crane that looked rusty and long disused. The bank was littered with paper trash, old tires, and discarded cans. Now the train he had passed beneath was over on that side, still slowing down, screeching and banging. Vic Destin, his friend Rolf’s father, said there had never been a mode of transportation as dirty and noisy as transportation by rail. He said it with satisfaction rather than disgust, which surprised neither of the boys. Mr. Destin was into trains bigtime.

Luke had almost reached the end of Maureen’s steps, and now it was actual steps he was looking for. Red ones. Not real red, though, Avery told him. Not anymore. She says they’re more like pink these days. And when Luke spotted them just five minutes after passing beneath the trestle, they were hardly even that. Although there was some pinky-red color left on the risers, the steps themselves were mostly gray. They rose from the water’s edge to the top of the embankment, maybe a hundred and fifty feet up. He paddled for them, and the keel of his little ship came aground on one just below the surface.

Luke debarked slowly, feeling as creaky as an old man. He thought of tying the S.S. Pokey up—enough rust had scaled off the posts to either side of the steps to tell him others had done that, probably fishermen—but the remainder of the rope tethered to the bow looked too short.

He let go of the boat, watched it start to drift away as the mild current grabbed it, then saw his footgear, with the socks tucked into them, still sitting on the stern seat. He dropped to his knees on the submerged step and managed to grab the rowboat just in time. He drew it past him hand over hand until he could grab his sneakers. Then he murmured “Thanks, Pokey,” and let it go.

He climbed a couple of steps and sat down to put on his shoes. They had dried pretty well, but now the rest of him was soaked. It hurt his scraped back to laugh, but he laughed anyway. He climbed the stairs that used to be red, pausing every now and then to rest his legs. Maureen’s scarf—in the morning light he could see that it was purple—came loose from around his waist. He thought of leaving it, then cinched it tight again. He didn’t see how they could follow him this far, but the town was a logical destination, and he didn’t want to leave a marker they might find, if only by chance. Besides, now the scarf felt important. It felt… he groped for a word that was at least close. Not lucky; talismanic. Because it was from her, and she was his savior.

By the time he got to the top of the steps, the sun was over the horizon, big and red, casting a bright glow on a tangle of railroad tracks. The freight beneath which he’d passed was now stopped in the Dennison River Bend switching yard. As the engine that had hauled it trundled slowly away, a bright yellow switch-engine pulled up to the rear of the train and would soon start it moving again, shoving it into the hump yard, where trains were broken up and reassembled.

The ins and outs of freight transport hadn’t been taught at the Broderick School, where the faculty was interested in more esoteric subjects like advanced math, climatology, and the later English poets; train lessons had been imparted by Vic Destin, balls-to-the-wall train freak and proud possessor of a huge Lionel set-up in his basement man cave. Luke and Rolf had spent a lot of hours there as his willing acolytes. Rolf liked running the model trains; the info about actual trains he could take or leave. Luke liked both. If Vic Destin had been a stamp collector, Luke would have examined his forays into philately with the same interest. It was just how he was built. He supposed that made him a bit on the creepy side (he had certainly caught Alicia Destin looking at him in a way which suggested that from time to time), but right now he blessed Mr. Destin’s excited lectures.

Maureen, on the other hand, knew next to nothing about trains, only that Dennison River Bend had a depot, and she thought the trains that came through it went to all sorts of places. What those places might be, she did not know.

“She thinks if you make it that far, maybe you can hop a freight,” Avery had said.

Well, he had made it this far. Whether or not he could actually hop a freight was another matter. He had seen it done in the movies, and with ease, but most movies were full of shit. It might be better to go to whatever passed for a downtown in this north country burg. Find the police station if there was one, call the State Police if there wasn’t. Only call with what? He had no cell, and pay phones were an endangered species. If he did find one, what was he supposed to drop into the coin slot? One of his Institute tokens? He supposed he could call 911 for free, but was that the right move? Something told him no.

He stood where he was in a day that was brightening entirely too fast for his liking, tugging nervously at the scarf around his waist. There were drawbacks to calling or going to the cops this close to the Institute; he could see them even in his current state of fear and exhaustion. The police would find out in short order that his parents were dead, murdered, and he was the most likely suspect. Another drawback was Dennison River Bend itself. Towns only existed if there was money coming in, money was their lifeblood, and where did Dennison River Bend’s money come from? Not from this trainyard, which would be largely automated. Not from those sad-looking buildings he’d seen. They might once have been factories, but no more. On the other hand, there was some sort of installation out there in one of the unincorporated townships (“government stuff,” the locals would say, nodding wisely to each other in the barber shop or the town square), and the people who worked there had money. Men and women who came to town, and not just to patronize that Outlaw Country place on the nights when some shitkicking band or other was playing. They brought in dollars. And maybe the Institute was contributing to the town’s welfare. They might have funded a community center, or a sports field, or kicked in for road maintenance. Anything that jeopardized those dollars would be looked at with skepticism and displeasure. For all Luke knew, the town officials might be getting regular payoffs to make sure the Institute didn’t attract attention from the wrong people. Was that paranoid thinking? Maybe. And maybe not.

Luke was dying to blow the whistle on Mrs. Sigsby and her minions, but he thought the best, safest thing he could do right now was get as far away from the Institute as fast as he could.

The switch-engine was pushing the current bunch of freight cars up the hill trainyard people called the hump. There were two rocking chairs on the porch of the yard’s tidy little office building. A man wearing jeans and bright red rubber boots sat in one of them, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. When the engine driver hit the horn, the guy put his paper aside and trotted down the steps, pausing to wave up at a glassed-in booth on steel stilts. A guy inside waved back. That would be the hump tower operator, and the guy in the red boots would be the pin-puller.

Rolf’s dad used to mourn over the moribund state of American rail transport, and now Luke saw his point. There were tracks heading in every direction, but it looked as though only four or five sets were currently operational. The others were flecked with rust, weeds growing up between the ties. There were stranded boxcars and flatcars on some of these, and Luke used them for cover, moving in on the office. He could see a clipboard hanging from a nail on one of the porch support posts. If that was today’s transport schedule, he wanted to read it.

He squatted behind an abandoned boxcar close to the rear of the tower, watching from beneath as the pin-puller went to the hump track. The newly arrived freight was at the top of the hump now, and all of the operator’s attention would be fixed there. If Luke was spotted, he’d probably be dismissed as just a kid who was, like Mr. Destin, a balls-to-the-wall train freak. Of course most kids didn’t come out at five-thirty in the morning to look at trains no matter how balls to the wall they were. Especially kids who were soaked in river water and sporting a badly mutilated ear.

No choice. He had to see what was on that clipboard.

Mr. Red Boots stepped forward as the first car in line rolled slowly past him, and pulled the pin coupling it to the next. The box—STATE OF MAINE PRODUCTS emblazoned on the side in red, white, and blue—went rolling down the hill, pulled by gravity, its speed controlled by radar-operated retarders. The hump tower operator yanked a lever, and STATE OF MAINE PRODUCTS diverted onto Track 4.

Luke walked around the boxcar and ambled toward the station office, hands in his pockets. He didn’t breathe freely until he was below the tower and out of the operator’s sightline. Besides, Luke thought, if he’s doing his job right, he’s got eyes on the current job and nowhere else.

The next car, a tanker, was sent to Track 3. Two car carriers also went to Track 3. They bumped and clashed and rolled. Vic Destin’s Lionel trains were pretty quiet, but this place was a looneybin of sound. Luke guessed that houses closer than a mile would get an earful three or four times each day. Maybe they get used to it, he thought. That was hard to believe until he thought of the kids going about their lives every day in the Institute—eating big meals, drinking nips, smoking the occasional cigarette, goofing on the playground, and running around at night, yelling their fool heads off. Luke guessed you could get used to anything. It was a horrible idea.

He reached the porch of the office, still well out of view of the tower operator, and the pin-puller’s back was to him. Luke didn’t think he’d turn around. “Lose focus in a job like that, and you’re apt to lose a hand,” Mr. Destin had told the boys once.

The computer sheet on top of the clipboard didn’t contain much; the columns for Tracks 2 and 5 bore only two words: NOTHING SCHEDULED. Track 1 had a freight to New Brunswick, Canada, scheduled in at 5 PM—no help there. Track 4 was due out for Burlington and Montreal at 2:30 PM. Better, but still not good enough; if he wasn’t gone by 2:30, he’d almost certainly be in big trouble. Track 3, where the pin-puller was now sending the New England Land Express box Luke had observed crossing the trestle, looked good. The cut-off for Train 4297—the time after which the station manager would not (theoretically at least) accept more freight—was 9 AM, and at 10 AM, ’97 was scheduled out of Dennison River Bend for Portland/ME, Portsmouth/NH, and Sturbridge/MA. That last town had to be at least three hundred miles away, maybe a lot more.

Luke retreated to the abandoned boxcar and watched as the cars continued to roll down the hump onto various tracks, some of them for the trains that would be heading out that day, others that would simply be left on various sidings until they were needed.

The pin-puller finished his job and climbed the switch-engine’s step to talk to the driver. The ops guy came out and joined them. There was laughter. It carried clearly to Luke on the still morning air, and he liked the sound. He had heard plenty of adult laughter in the C-Level break room, but it had always sounded sinister to him, like the laughter of orcs in a Tolkien story. This was coming from men who had never locked up a bunch of kids, or dunked them in an immersion tank. The laughter of men who did not carry the special Tasers known as zap-sticks.

The switch driver handed out a bag. The pin-puller took it and stepped down. As the engine started slowly down the hump, the pin-puller and the station operator each took a doughnut from the bag. Big ones dusted with sugar and probably stuffed with jelly. Luke’s stomach rumbled.

The two men sat in the porch rocking chairs and munched their doughnuts. Luke, meanwhile, turned his attention to the cars waiting on Track 3. There were twelve in all, half of them boxcars. Probably not enough to make up a train going to Massachusetts, but others might be sent over from the transfer yard, where there were fifty or more just waiting around.

Meanwhile, a sixteen-wheeler pulled into the trainyard and bumped across several sets of tracks to the boxcar labeled STATE OF MAINE PRODUCTS. It was followed by a panel truck. Several men got out of the panel and began loading barrels from the traincar into the semi. Luke could hear them talking in Spanish, and was able to pick out a few words. One of the barrels tipped over and potatoes poured out. There was a lot of good-natured laughter, and a brief potato fight. Luke watched with longing.

The station operator and the pin-puller watched the potato fight from the porch rockers, then went inside. The semi left, now loaded with fresh spuds bound for McDonald’s or Burger King. It was followed by the panel truck. The yard was momentarily deserted, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long; there could be more loading and unloading, and the switch-engine driver might be busy adding more cars to the freight scheduled to leave at 10 AM.

Luke decided to take his chance. He started out from behind the deserted boxcar, then darted back when he saw the switch-engine driver walking up the hump, holding a phone to his ear. He stopped for a moment, and Luke was afraid he might have been seen, but the guy was apparently just finishing his call. He put his phone in the bib pocket of his overalls and passed the box Luke was hiding behind without so much as a glance. He mounted the porch steps and went into the office.

Luke didn’t wait, and this time he didn’t amble. He sprinted down the hump, ignoring the pain in his back and tired legs, hopping over tracks and retarder braking pads, dodging around speed sensor posts. The cars waiting for the Portland-Portsmouth-Sturbridge run included a red box with SOUTHWAY EXPRESS on the side, the words barely readable beneath all the graffiti that had been added over its years of service. It was grimy, nondescript, and strictly utilitarian, but it had one undeniable attraction: the sliding side door wasn’t entirely shut. Enough of a gap, maybe, for a skinny, desperate boy to slip through.

Luke caught a rust-streaked grab-handle and pulled himself up. The gap was wide enough. Wider, in fact, than the one he’d dug beneath the chainlink fence at the Institute. That seemed a very long time ago, almost in another life. The side of the door scraped his already painful back and buttocks, starting new trickles of blood, but then he was inside. The car was about three-quarters full, and although it looked like a mutt on the outside, it smelled pretty great on the inside: wood, paint, furniture- and engine-oil.

The contents were a mishmash that made Luke think of his Aunt Lacey’s attic, although the stuff she had stored was old, and all of this was new. To the left there were lawnmowers, weed-whackers, leaf-blowers, chainsaws, and cartons containing automotive parts and outboard motors. To the right was furniture, some in boxes but most mummified in yards of protective plastic. There was a pyramid of standing lamps on their sides, bubble-wrapped and taped together in threes. There were chairs, tables, loveseats, even sofas. Luke went to a sofa close to the partially opened door and read the invoice taped to the bubble wrap. It (and presumably the rest of the furniture) was to be delivered to Bender and Bowen Fine Furniture, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Luke smiled. Train ’97 might lose some cars in the Portland and Portsmouth yards, but this one was going all the way to the end of the line. His luck had not run out yet.

“Somebody up there likes me,” he whispered. Then he remembered his mother and father were dead, and thought, But not that much.

He pushed some of the Bender and Bowen cartons a little way out from the far sidewall of the boxcar and was delighted to see a pile of furniture pads behind them. They smelled musty but not moldy. He crawled into the gap and pulled the boxes back as much as he could.

He was finally in a relatively safe place, he had a pile of soft pads to lie on, and he was exhausted—not just from his night run, but from the days of broken rest and escalating fear that had led up to his escape. But he did not dare sleep yet. Once he actually did doze off, but then he heard the sound of the approaching switch-engine, and the Southway Express boxcar jerked into motion. Luke got up and peered out through the partially open door. He saw the trainyard passing. Then the car jolted to a stop, almost knocking him off his feet. There was a metallic crunch that he assumed was his box being attached to another car.

Over the next hour or so there were more thumps and jolts as more cars were added to what would soon be Number 4297, headed into southern New England and away from the Institute.

Away, Luke thought. Away, away, away.

A couple of times he heard men talking, once quite close, but there was too much noise to make out what they were saying. Luke listened and chewed at fingernails that were already chewed down to the quick. What if they were talking about him? He remembered the switch-engine driver gabbing on his cell phone. What if Maureen had talked? What if he had been discovered missing? What if one of Mrs. Sigsby’s minions—Stackhouse seemed the most likely—had called the trainyard and told the station operator to search all outgoing cars? If that happened, would the man start with boxcars that had slightly open side doors? Did a bear shit in the woods?

Then the voices dwindled and were lost. The bumps and shoves continued as 4297 took on weight and freight. Vehicles came and went. Sometimes there were honks. Luke jumped at every one. He wished to God he knew what time it was, but he didn’t. He could only wait.

After what seemed forever, the bumps and thumps ceased. Nothing happened. Luke began to edge toward another doze and had almost made it when the biggest thump of all came, tossing him sideways. There was a pause, then the train began to move again.

Luke squirmed out of his hiding place and went to the partially open door. He looked out just in time to see the green-painted office building slide past. The operator and the pin-puller were back in their rocking chairs, each with a piece of the newspaper. 4297 thudded over a final junction point, then passed another cluster of deserted buildings. Next came a weedy ballfield, a trash dump, a couple of empty lots. The train rolled by a trailer park where kids were playing.

Minutes later, Luke found himself looking at downtown Dennison River Bend. He could see shops, streetlights, slant parking, sidewalks, a Shell station. He could see a dirty white pickup waiting for the train to pass. These things were just as amazing to him as the sight of the stars over the river had been. He was out. There were no techs, no caretakers, no token-operated machines where kids could buy booze and cigarettes. As the car swayed into a mild turn, Luke braced his hands against the boxcar’s sidewalls and shuffled his feet. He was too tired to lift them, and so it was a very poor excuse for a victory dance, but that was what it was, just the same.

23

Once the town was gone, replaced by deep forest, exhaustion slammed Luke. It was like being buried under an avalanche. He crawled behind the cartons again, first lying on his back, which was his preferred sleeping position, then turning over on his stomach when the lacerations on his shoulderblades and buttocks protested. He was asleep at once. He slept through the stop at Portland and the one in Portsmouth, although the train jerked each time a few old cars were subtracted from 4297’s pull-load and others were added. He was still asleep when the train stopped at Sturbridge, and only struggled back to consciousness when the door of his box was rattled open, filling it with the hot light of a July late afternoon.

Two men came in and started loading the furniture into a truck backed up to the open boxcar door—first the sofas, then the lamp trios, then the chairs. Soon they would start on the cartons, and Luke would be discovered. There were all those engines and lawnmowers, and plenty of room to hide behind them in the far corner, but if he moved he would also be discovered.

One of the loading guys approached. He was close enough for Luke to smell his aftershave when someone called from outside. “Hey, you guys, there’s a delay on the engine transfer. Shouldn’t be long, but you got time for a coffee, if you want one.”

“How about a beer?” asked the man who would have seen Luke on his bed of furniture pads in another three seconds.

This was greeted with laughter, and the men left. Luke backed out of his space and hobbled to the door on legs that were stiff and painful. Around the edge of the truck that was being loaded, he saw three men strolling toward the station-house. This one was painted red instead of green, and was four times the size of the one at Dennison River Bend. The sign on the front of the building said STURBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS.

Luke thought of slipping out through the gap between the boxcar and the truck, but this trainyard was in full swing, with lots of workmen (and a few workwomen) going here and there on foot and in vehicles. He would be seen, he would be questioned, and he knew he could not tell his story coherently in his present condition. He was vaguely aware that he was hungry, and a little more aware of his throbbing ear, but those things paled before his need for more sleep. Perhaps this boxcar would be shunted onto a sidetrack once the furniture was unloaded, and once it was dark, he could find the nearest police station. By then he might be able to talk without sounding like a lunatic. Or not completely like one. They might not believe him, but he was sure they would give him something to eat, and maybe some Tylenol for his throbbing ear. Telling them about his parents was his trump card. That was something they could verify. He would be returned to Minneapolis. That would be good, even if it meant going to some kind of kiddy facility. There would be locks on the doors, but no immersion tank.

Massachusetts was an excellent start, he had been fortunate to get this far, but it was still too close to the Institute. Minneapolis, on the other hand, was home. He knew people. Mr. Destin might believe him. Or Mr. Greer, at the Broderick School. Or…

But he couldn’t think of anyone else. He was too tired. Trying to think was like trying to look through a window bleared with grease. He got on his knees and crawled to the far-right corner of the Southway Express box and peered out from between two rototillers, waiting for the men from the truck to come back and finish loading the furniture destined for Bender and Bowen Fine Furniture. They might still find him, he knew. They were guys, and guys liked to inspect anything with a motor in it. They might want to look at the riding mowers, or the weed-whackers. They might want to check the horsepower on the new Evinrudes—they were crated, but all the info would be on the invoices. He would wait, he would make himself small, he would hope that his luck—already stretched thin—would stretch a little further. And if they didn’t find him, he would sink back into sleep.

Only there was no waiting or watching for Luke. He lay on one arm and was asleep again in minutes. He slept when the two men came back and finished their loading chores. He slept when one of them bent to check out a John Deere garden tractor not four feet from where Luke lay curled up and dead to the world. He slept when they left and one of the yard workers closed the Southway’s door, this time all the way. He slept through the thud and thump of new cars being added, and stirred just slightly when a new engine replaced 4297. Then he slept again, a twelve-year-old fugitive who had been harried and hurt and terrified.

Train 4297 had a pull-limit of forty cars. Vic Destin would have identified the new loco as a GE AC6000CW, the 6000 standing for the horsepower it was capable of generating. It was one of the most powerful diesel locomotives at work in America, able to pull a train over a mile long. Running out of Sturbridge, first southeast and then dead south, this express train, 9956, was pulling seventy cars.

Luke’s box was mostly empty now, and would remain that way until 9956 stopped in Richmond, Virginia, where two dozen Kohler home generators would be added to its load. Most of these were tagged for Wilmington, but two—and the entire assortment of small-engine appliances and doodads behind which Luke was now sleeping—were going to Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service, in the little town of DuPray, South Carolina. 9956 stopped there three times a week.

Great events turn on small hinges.